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PHOTOGRAPHS BY KHOLOOD EID
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By Craig Welch, ENVIRONMENT Writer
My wife took me fly fishing on our first date. I’d spent my adult life in the mountains, huffing up lupine trails and clambering over granite boulders, eager to gulp that high-country air. But I’d never tossed a drake or a tiny blue wing olive into a riffle on a bend in a mountain stream. This woman had, and it had transformed her.
As the icy Snake River pushed against my knees, and the hot southern Idaho sun baked my shoulders, fishing began to change me, too. My future partner showed me the little cases that caddisfly larvae build on stones. She taught me to spot barely perceptible shifts in current and to tell the difference between whitefish and cutthroat trout just by the way each tugged on my line. Over the next 20 years, we’d spend hundreds of hours on the water, in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. We fished across Canada and alongside bears in Alaska. I started seeing rivers and mountain ecosystems through new eyes. You could say I’d fallen in love twice.
So, I felt a sharp pang when writer Christopher Solomon detailed all the ways climate change may spell doom for many freshwater fish. As winters warm and snows come less often, rivers grow too thin and hot for species like trout and steelhead, which need rushing frigid currents. Some die outright, while others grow more susceptible to disease. The bugs they eat are disappearing, too, and native species are hybridizing with others. (Pictured above, fly-fishing guide Hilary Hutcheson with her family; below, a distinctive westslope cutthroat trout, Montana’s official state fish, which is threatened by hybridization.)
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