Paradise Valley Spring Creeks

Is this the end of the Paradise Valley Spring Creeks--O'Hairs and DePuys anyway? I haven't been over to Nelson's in a long time, and I've heard good reports about Nelson's this summer. But O'Hairs (aka Armstrong's) and DePuy's spring creek are definately in trouble. DePuys has been in decline for five or six consecutive years now. The first two or three seasons after the last big Yellowstone River flood, in 1997, where banner years on the creeks. The late June and early July PMD hatches were so thick you were afraid to take a deep breath, back then. The fish were everywhere: big browns hiding under the edges of moss beds and willow branches, pods of cruising rainbows sipping the yellow-bodied mayflies as the trickled off the riffles, solitary cutthroats hiding in weed pockets at the tail ends of the pools. I remember one eary July day in 1998 when my wife Adele must have caught 30 fish in Dick's Riffle, out in front of the DePuy mansion, right below the swan pond. The PMDs used to start like clock work: at 11:15-11:45, and hatch continously 'til at least 2:30 in the afternoon. Longer on cloudy days. Since that last great year, however, the hatches have thinned out every year and the number of fish in the creek has dropped off correspondingly. Six or seven bad years isn't such a long time. Perhaps this is just some unexplained phenomenon. Perhaps the long wet June and July rains we've had this year mark the end of a long drought. Perhaps all will be well again soon. But I doubt that...for some reason. Is it New Zealand mud snails usurping the habitat? Too much spraying of leafy spurge with chemicals like Roundup? Too many years of low water (why is Nelson's still good?). No one really knows, least of all me. But the bottom line remains, regardless the cause: with the hatches this thin and the fish this sparse, it just isn't worth a $100 cash to go fish there anymore. I've been paying for creek time every year since I stopped guiding in 1995 (when I graduated MSU at the age of 45). But this is the last year for me, at least until the hatches come back. The Yellowstone River free and it's just too good this time of year. The creeks used to win that race, years ago. But they don't anymore. The river is a better experience now, and the price is hard to beat. Ten years ago you couldn't get a July time slot on the creeks. Now you can. That says something.