Originally published on hintofriches.com (May 8, 2021)
This is a MUST READ for anyone interested in the NINE MILE HOLE potential solve. Contains tantalizing details about the potential search area.
Rivers are not static. They change, sometimes dramatically, over the years. This can transform, or even eliminate, once prosperous fishing holes.
Today, Nine Mile Hole is a legend, rather than a great fishing spot. To appreciate what it was decades ago, you have to hear the words (and passion) of an expert.
Ernest Schwiebert (1931–2005) was an architect by profession, who became a renowned angler and angling author. He wrote extensively about fly fishing for trout and salmon. Interestingly, he also served in the Air Force.
The following excerpt about Nine Mile Hole is from one of his voluminous books, which I don’t believe many in the chase would have ever gotten very deep into.
I hope you enjoy reading it, as I did.
“But the entire Yellowstone was ravaged by a series of wildfires in the drought of 1992…”
“Gullies were quickly cut into unstable hillsides, and large alluvial fans of gritty clay and ash were formed at many places along the Madison, Gibbon, and Firehole. Such fans were visible immediately below Seven Mile Bridge on the Madison, and there was much worse damage at its famous Nine-Mile Hole, which had been the most popular pool.
Nine-Mile lay just below the highway, in a beautiful corridor of primeval lodgepoles and ponderosas, where the river came spilling through a swift reach filled with big deadfalls and giant boulders. It was a striking place with secrets. There was a crystalline springhead pond across the water, about a quarter mile beyond the river, and completely hidden behind a dense screen of intervening conifers. Its outlet was an icy rivulet that spilled swiftly through the trees before riffling into the throat of Nine-Mile.
Large brown trout were known to enter this minor lodgepole tributary in October to mate and lay their eggs, and the fry remained in its limpid sanctuary to prosper and grow while the adult fish eventually returned to the main river. I once caught a good fish in the little pond itself, prospecting its perimeter with a muskrat-bodied nymph. The fish was a handsome five-pound hen that had apparently spawned and wintered, and then elected to stay.
The cold spillages of the crystalline creek entered the river in the uppermost shallows at Nine-Mile, and its discharges were often pinioned against the opposite bank by the much stronger flow of the Madison itself. Large colonies of elodea and other aquatic weed were usually rooted there, in the quiet seam between the river’s primary current tongues and the cooler discharges of the creek upstream. It was a spring-hole worth knowing. Large trout often gathered there in hot weather, basking in its cool temperatures where the ledge rock shelved off into a secret pocket. I could usually count on at least one good fish there, because most anglers simply fished the primary currents of Nine-Mile without covering the pocket below its aquatic weeds.
But then the wildfires raged across the valley, cauterizing the plateau cornices beyond the river, and left destruction in their wake. The earthquake had dropped immense acreages of its timbered floor just above the Seven Mile Bridge, transforming its lodgepole forest into a marsh filled with derelicts and stumps. These dead lodgepoles had largely escaped the fires, but bigger stands farther upstream had become a fire-blackened wasteland. Unthinkable tonnages of fresh ash and unstable volcanic soil have been displaced from its steep talus slides and slopes across the river, and some of these gritty materials are still leaching into the Madison. The pretty reach that Bud Lilly called Slow Bend had been smothered in displaced sediments when I attempted to fish it two summers after the fires, and other favorite places had suffered a similar fate.
The fate of Nine-Mile, however, was a terrible surprise.
Its little tributary creek had been reduced to several rivulets of gunmetal slurry, and most of its discharges were flowing through the trees downstream, plunging into the middle and lower reaches of the pool in several places. The fish-filled secret below the weeds was smothered with silt and trash, and the spring-hole itself was gone. I became curious about the fate of the forest pond, and forded the river to inspect it. Dour rivulets of slurry came spilling through the trees, and I was astonished when I reached the tarn.
Its crystalline shallows were completely filled with slurry and trash. A tiny paradise had been destroyed. The outlet was clogged with refuse and silt, and the barrage of trash had raised the water in the lake until its overflows were forced into several braided channels farther downstream. No trout could ascend such gritty rivulets to spawn, and no freshly hatched juveniles would use its spatterdock riches to reach smolting size. Nine-Mile itself had been irrevocably changed, and after dutifully suiting up, I found myself angry and unable to fish. I stripped off my fishing gear and decided to explore damage on the Gibbon and Firehole.”
— Nymphs, Stoneflies, Caddisflies and Other Important Insects (2007), by Ernest Schwiebert
