So, for better or worse, our desires were granted. Almost overnight, we went from bitter to balmy. For about a week now, the highs have approached sixty, the lower elevation snow is basically gone, and we’re even seeing hints of green grass! In fact, in an ironic twist on my usual season activities; I haven’t been skiing yet, but went flyfishing yesterday! Normally, my interest in fishing is nil this time of year, but my son has the bug in a major way. He’d been out a couple days prior, and hooked up with several trout, including a monster brown on the Gallatin. Yesterday was his 16^th birthday, and one of his gifts was a selection of alleged killer flies from Blue Ribbon Flies in West Yellowstone. I’d recently met the owners, Craig and Jackie Mathews, on a trip to West to pitch our bison bill to the town council, and was enormously impressed. Craig was recently named "Angler of the Year" by Fly Rod and Reel magazine, but I found their shop totally devoid of the pretentiousness that afflicts a lot of flyfishing emporiums here in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Not only that, they’ve developed numerous innovative fly patterns, although our tests of them yesterday were largely inconclusive, as I was ignomiously skunked and Cody only caught one smallish trout. Further research on this matter is clearly called for. To that end, I’m also reading Craig’s book "Western Flyfishing Strategies", which I highly recommend.

As regular readers know, my personal recreational passions lean more toward hunting than fishing, so I was further impressed to find that Craig is a rabid elk hunter also. In fact, in his "Year in Review" column, the first few paragraphs are about elk and don’t even mention fishing. Now that’s my kind of fisherman! On that note, however, a friend drew one of the highly coveted Madison late bull tags, and has been in pursuit of monster bulls the last three days. He’s still at it today (mojo sent, Paul) and last night relayed a most unusual report for this time of year. He’d seen an immense herd of elk on the Sun Ranch, which is not unusual in the least, but they were lined out single file and heading south, apparently migrating off their winter range! Now that is most unusual for late January, and not a little alarming…

Blizzard-besieged residents of many other parts of the country would likely take little comfort in our global warming conditions, but Montana has missed out on most of the meteorological mayhem that is afflicting them. The long-range forecast is for continued mild weather through May, after which the forecast is inconclusive. Perhaps we’ll experience a repeat of last year, when the later winter and early spring was nearly devoid of any precipitation, but then were blessed with regular rainfall through the rest of the spring & summer. Let’s hope so….