Stolen from "Buster wants to Flyfish"

Some Good News on a Friday/Wednesday
Posted in time is subjective, Fish Local on July 9th, 2010 by Salty
“The world was new each day for God so made it daily.” - Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

There’s been a dearth of good news from the world lately. On the micro level, people are still fishing, still traveling, still finding maps and mazes through the latter bewilderment. The big picture has been basically shit though. BP fucked the Gulf royally, unemployment is at a 60 year high, the national political scene looks like Room 8 of the local high school where the deliquents, incompetents and developmentally challenged are warehoused for 4 years and “not getting worse” is considered “getting better”.

Maybe that is why, while reading through this morning’s news, the latest entry in the Times Editorial Notebook caught my attention.

“A couple of weeks ago, I walked along a spring creek in the upper Madison Valley, just south of the town of Ennis, Mont. As my guide, Jeff Laszlo, explained, the creek is one of the unnamed tributaries of the Madison River, fed by innumerable springs along the valley’s rich bottomland. The creek meanders for miles before it reaches the Madison, gaining water, providing spawning grounds for fish and invaluable wetland habitat for birds. I looked on in disbelief, because the section we were hiking — nearly eight miles of cold, clear waters — did not exist before 2005.

Or rather, it existed until 1951, when Jeff Laszlo’s grandfather dewatered this section of land by digging canals to draw the water along the edge of one of the alluvial benches that define the Madison Valley. His purpose was to move water to other sections of his ranch and to improve the grazing. In the narrow agricultural logic of the time, his ditches made a certain economic sense. And if it seems strange that his grandson would undo all that work 60-some years later, Laszlo notes that he is simply obeying a different economic logic — one that considers increased biodiversity to be one of the ranch’s most important assets.”

Granted, restoration on the spring creek was done to start a pay to play fishing operation on the ranch, but this is not the Beaver. Instead of privateering a public waterway, Jeff Laszlo restored what had once been obliterated. It feels good to read about 8 miles or so of trout stream being added and not destroyed. We need more of this.