So I was about halfway through writing this report when we got word from one of the folks we had sent down to fish below the dam at Ennis Lake this morning that for some reason the road to the dam was closed off at the bridge. I e-mailed David Hoffman at PP&L to find out what the deal was. Dave called me back within minutes and said he was on his way down there. So apparently a huge boulder (more like the side of a small mountain) fell onto the dam (Ennis, not Hebgen) early this morning severely damaging three of the flow control gates, their hydraulic controls and a good bit of the surrounding structure. We (and PP&L) can’t catch a break here. The rock itself is sitting on top of the dam (you can see some initial photos here: http://madison.homestead.com/index.html) and doesn’t look to be going anywhere any time soon. Local authorities as well as PP&L engineers and officials have responded and are now analyzing the situation before proceeding. So far they’ve decided that it will be necessary to draw down Ennis Lake initially by about 5 feet (yes, that lake only averages 8 or 9 feet deep so it’ll end up being pretty ugly out there in a few days, especially at that south end) to relieve some of the back-pressure on the dam. At some point they'll need to take it down another 4 feet to do a full damage inspection. There don't seem to be any real immediate ramifications for us here on the upper river. Initially PP&L thought they may need to drop the flows up here down to the minimum but they have since decided that this won't be necessary, at least for the time being. The flow did drop today but apparently that was planned prior to the incident this morning. The flow out of Hebgen is 900 cfs which translates to about 1000 at Kirby. Still quite good for fish and fishing. So, o.k, I’m not going to whine too much about this, after all it’s no ones fault. Crazy though, we skated through with a nice cool summer, which nicely mitigated any thermal gain from the repairs at Hebgen. PP&L was doing a great job of keeping a good flow rate in the upper river and keeping the water as cool as possible as well. We had nice stable flows and it was looking like we’d have them through September. Now this….oh boy. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still in the very initial stages so we’ll have to see what the engineers say here in the next week or so. Hopefully the cool weather will continue and keep the water temperature in that fish friendly range. It’s supposed to be quite cool here for at least the next week or so. I’m assuming we’ll get a bit of Indian summer before it’s all said and done. And yes, for those of you who don't believe in coincidences...it was two years ago tomorrow (Aug 31st) that the intake tower structure at Hebgen Dam failed and Dave also reminded me that the earthquake that formed Quake Lake happened in August 1959...Hhmmm.... This past week the fishing has been great. Better and more consistent by far than anything we’ve seen this summer. The fish were up on smaller hoppers and ants in the afternoons and still eating the larger hopper patterns and Chernobyls for those nocturnal stones throughout the days. In the wet, gray weather lots of folks have switched over to throwing streamers with generally good, if not mixed results. This craziness with the dam shouldn’t really effect the fishing on the upper. We should still be in for some great hopper fishing here in the next few weeks. The traffic out there had been quite light recently as well so that’ll help things. If nothing else, wading anglers will have a little easier time of it. Stay tuned.

Stay tuned for continuing River updates!

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