Month: May 2022

Madison River Fishing Report for May 28th, 2022

Dam: 361 cfs

Kirby: 1,130 cfs

Varney: 1,870 cfs

Up she goes.  After several days of warm temperatures and overnight precipitation, the Upper Madison is on the rise and it doesn’t look like the faucet is turning off in the foreseeable future.  The forecast is calling for heavy rain through Monday morning and a fair amount of snow up in the mountains, so it looks like we are going to have a fairly sizable runoff after all.  Water clarity is still over three feet with a slight green tinge above the West Fork, but the creeks are starting to pump out a lot of muddy water as you can see from the picture above.  Right now the West Fork of the Madison is putting in a sizable stripe, but clarity is still very good on the right side of the river all the way down to Palisades — Once you get between Pal and Ruby it definitely starts to get a lot dirtier though. Also worth mentioning is that with Beaver and Cabin creeks putting in over 700 cfs into Quake Lake we expect the mud to make it to the river by Monday or Tuesday at the latest which could make fishing the float section below Lyon’s Bridge a lot more difficult depending on the visibility. As you might have noticed, flows out of Hebgen are extremely low as NorthWestern Energy continues to hold them back in order to fill Hebgen Reservoir by the end of June.  Currently we are just under 80% of full pool, but are going to get a lot of water coming into the lake over the next few weeks.  All that being said, you might consider giving those fish between the dam and Cabin Creek a break as there is very little water they can hold in.

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Madison River Fishing Report for May 17th, 2022

5/23 Flow & Clarity Update

 The Upper Madison is still running clear in the wade stretch between Quake and Lyons and the float stretch is running with just a tinge of green below Palisdades.  Flows out of Hebgen dropped to 405 cfs as of yesterday as Northwestern Energy is making sure they can fill Hebgen Lake by the end of June.  Flows at the Kirby gauge are 619 cfs and Varney is running at 795 cfs. We expect the clarity to get worse from Lyon’s down to Ennis with the warm weather in the forecast on Wednesday and Thursday, which should get the West Fork of the Madison running brown again.

 

Dam: 640 cfs

Kirby: 886 cfs

Varney: 1,160 cfs

The Upper Madison has been fishing well this week, and the cooler temperatures have kept the creeks low and clear up until last night.   The river is still running clear from the Slide Area down to Pine Butte, but the West Fork is putting in a good stripe of mud down the center of the river and Cabin and Beaver Creeks have started to put a lot of dirty water into Quake Lake.   Our guess is that Quake will start to get more brown-olive in color in the next week or so. If you are looking to float the river, the mud starts to mix evenly between Palisades and Ruby and there was approximately 8″ of visibility in Ennis this morning.  There is a good possibility that the cold front coming in on Thursday could slow things down a little bit, but I think it’s safe to say that the first stages of Spring runoff have started on the Upper Madison.

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Madison River Fishing Report for May 2nd, 2022

Dam: 640 cfs

Kirby: 710 cfs

Varney: 789 cfs

The Upper Madison continues to fish well this Spring, and we have a little more water to work with since our last report.  Flows out of Hebgen were brought up to 640 cfs last week, and will probably remain there for another 4-6 weeks until the reservoir starts to hit that upper 80 to low 90 percentile.  It’ll be awhile, but we think it will get pretty close to full pool this year as spring storms continue to fill our mountains with wet snow and our valleys with some much needed rain.  Our current snowpack in the Madison range is up to 92% and we hope to continue to build on that in the weeks to come.

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