After months of bickering by all these red and blue folks, this green guy is glad everything is all white. The Eagle Valley has a very welcome early season blanket of cold, white, water and it has instantly raised every little creatures spirits. I hope it's not temporary.
I've been brushing up on some western water history with Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert and I'm realizing how blinding this new snow can be. When powder comes from the sky in Colorado during the winter, huge blizzard or not, we tend to view it as money and report higher earnings than we really have. Mr. Reisner does an incredible job of showing how, politicians, municipalities, big ag and a little town called Los Angeles did pretty much the same thing around the turn of the last century; They got ahead of themselves. We North Americans, all of us, have a terrible history with how we manage water and I can't help but feel we are about to go down a familiar path when it comes to politics and a very unstable environment. This new Climate change report that the government gave us for dessert over Thanksgiving covers everything we humanoids have succeeded in boogering up, but around here water is gold. Until both parties, the red one and the blue one, get together and make a purple party that is interested in Mother Earths best interests's first, well then it's going to be sooner than later when waters thicker than blood, like it was in the 1930's.
I'm afraid.
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Mean while the change in the weather has thinned out the crowd on the river and the fishing has been great. Midge and egg type flies are producing for us on The Eagle and the streamer bite from the boats is still solid. Fly tying season is here.
The winter box needed a little push of something bigger than a #22 Midge this morning so I threw some #6 Golden Bareback Pats together.
