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| The last retrieve of the season. |
That was something a now-deceased hydrologist and friend of a neighbor liked to point out concerning the occasional problems that frozen water, better known as ice, causes. Recent ice jams at Twin Bridges and Ennis are cases in point.
This time of year, I frequently go through the community of Twin Bridges on my way to and from some of my duck hunting spots (and that is as specific as I’ll get as to just where I hunt those ducks). As always, it’s interesting to see what happens when winter hits western Montana and some of those rivers, such as the Jefferson and Beaverhead, start freezing.
The town of Twin Bridges was built right on the banks of the Beaverhead, including some businesses and the local high school that are just feet away from the river. Fortunately, the banks on the other side of the river are a bit lower so when there’s high water, the river can spread out without causing catastrophic damage.
A couple weeks ago I went through and everything looked normal. The river was flowing along with patches of slush ice on the surface. On the west side of the river there is a small park and rest area on the north side of the highway and the Madison County Fairgrounds on the south side. Every December a low spot in that little park is flooded to create an outdoor skating rink.
In most years skating doesn’t last long, as there are usually warm spells in early January that turn the rink into slush. If you’re a skater, you have to get out there and enjoy it during the short period before the ice melts.
It was a surprise when the flooding on the Beaverhead due to ice jams downstream from Twin Bridges became the hot news a couple weeks ago. The flooding would have happened a day after I was there when everything looked normal.
My last duck trip of the season came after several days of warm weather gave the ice a chance to break up and let the water recede, though subzero weather had returned on that hunting day. In the morning the river was running pretty much normally. By noon, the ice floes had merged again and the water was again rising.
Ironically, the skating rink was closed, this time because the park was iced over. The ice rink was under a couple feet of water and new ice. Benches poking up above the ice marked where skaters might have taken a break a couple weeks earlier. The good news was that the ice rink was dramatically larger than usual. The bad news, of course, is that the new ice is unsafe; otherwise there’d be enough ice for an Olympic racing oval.
All this underscores problems humans create when they build communities next to rivers, seemingly without worrying about what might happen when streams go over their banks.
If those ice floes cause problems, they also create opportunities. In fact, when it comes to duck hunting, I depend on river ice to move ducks off the rivers and onto the warm water spring creeks I hunt.
As the season winds down duck numbers drop as more and more ducks decide there must be better places to spend the winter than Montana. Still, on that last mid-January hunt Flicka, my faithful Labrador retriever, and I managed to get within shooting range of a small bunch of ducks and Flicka happily swam across a warm pond to retrieve one last drake mallard to end our season. After a couple minutes, Flicka was frosted with ice that formed on her coat in the zero degree temperatures. I doubt she even noticed that it was cold outside.
The hunting season is over. It has been a long time since those hot days of early September to January’s deep freeze, but it went all too quickly. It’s time to clean guns and equipment and put things away for the season. It’s time, and I’m content.
Just try convincing Flicka
