“Then they just kept dying,” she said. “Thousands and thousands of them. They're all arctic grayling, and they're all over the place. The stink's pretty bad.”
The summer sun that's cooking the stink is the same relentless heat that's killing the fish.
Rogers Lake, located a short ways west of Kalispell off U.S. Highway 2, is a quiet and peaceful place. Moose and eagles and loons raise their young there, and Schiess and her husband watch the world unfold from the camper they keep on their lakeshore property.
Last year, she said, she saw fish floating on Rogers Lake for the first time. It was July 29, and by the time the temperature dropped, a few hundred grayling were belly up.
“It was sad,” she said, “but manageable.”
This year, though, what with these persistent high temperatures, has a whole different smell entirely, Schiess said, “and I personally think we're just starting to see the tip of the iceberg in terms of summer fish kills.”
Icebergs notwithstanding, the trend toward warmer water does seem clear, clearer at least than it was a half-century ago when biologists first stocked Rogers Lake. The waterway, Weaver said, was quite likely barren back before people put fish there.
It's shallow enough to freeze out during cold winters, to bake under summer sun, and it's a long ways down a small stream to the Flathead River system.
But at some point in the middle part of the 20th century, people like Weaver decided Rogers Lake would be a great place to raise native arctic grayling. Biologists needed a place to let the fish breed so they could collect the eggs, raise the fry and distribute grayling to other waters around the state.
“Rogers Lake has been the brood lake for grayling for most of the state,” Weaver said.
Now Schiess thinks it might be time to reconsider that plan.
She and her husband travel Rogers Lake in an old Coleman canoe, once bright red but now sun-bled to a tired pink, and they both wear rubber gloves. They carry a fish net “for the ones that aren't too decayed” and a big stack of plastic garbage bags.
Usually, they go out in the morning, when the lake is still and the air is cool. They haul dead fish off the surface, from between the lily pads, “and we can get 25 or 30 in one garbage bag.”
Each fish weighs a couple of pounds, she said, and they quickly fill the canoe, bag after bag after bag.
“We load the canoe up until we feel like it won't carry any more.”
And then they paddle to the lake's southern shore, where no one lives, and wrestle the slippery, sloppy bags up the bank, dumping the grayling there in a heap. It is not a good solution, she admits, but it beats having dead fish all over your front yard, especially here in bear country.
“It's pretty disgusting and depressing work,” Schiess said, “with all the flies and maggots and fish slime.”
Left in the lake, the dead fish would either wash up on residents' properties, where the smell attracts scavengers, or they would sink.
If they sink, though, they decompose, fertilizing Rogers Lake with a stiff brew of fishy nutrients. Then, Schiess said, those nutrients feed non-native weeds and algae, which already are choking the lake. Those plants, in turn, soak up the oxygen from the water and more fish die - the lake atrophies.
“That is a real concern,” Weaver agreed. “A legitimate concern.”
“So we haul them out, away from the houses,” Schiess said.
She keeps a diary. In one week, she and her husband bagged about 1,500 dead grayling, and “we are barely making a dent in the number of dead fish. There were a lot of grayling in this lake, and it's going to be a long, hot summer for these fish.”
And not just these fish, but fish everywhere living in shallow lakes with small inlets and outlets - lakes, Weaver said, that have “long retention times.”
In other words, if water doesn't pass quickly through a shallow lake, then it has time to warm up. Smith Lake, also west of Kalispell, “is only about six feet deep,” Weaver said, with a very long retention time. “I can't imagine how hot that water must be by now.”
Weaver, for one, “would not be surprised if a lot of these small lakes were in trouble right now.”
And still, Schiess' long hot summer is getting longer and hotter, with meteorologists predicting no relief in sight, short term or long term.
A recent federal report exploring the effects of a warming climate on regional fisheries concluded that of the past 12 years, 11 rank as the warmest since record-keeping began in the mid-1800s.
The same report anticipates that in the next 25 years, temperature increases will render between 2 percent and 7 percent of current trout habitat unsuitable; 5 percent to 20 percent by 2060; 8 percent to 33 percent by 2090.
Bull trout, a species particularly fond of cold water, could lose up to 92 percent of its habitat range, depending on the rate of climate change. None of which bodes well for arctic grayling, who live here at the southern end of their historic range. They already are dying in the heat.
So Schiess and her husband would like some help, more hands to make light work of tons of grayling flesh.
They would like some new fishing rules, making it possible for anglers to catch and keep more grayling from Rogers Lake.
And they would like biologists at FWP to consider whether a new “brood stock” lake might be needed, a new waterway deeper and colder and not quite so lethal.
“Those are all good and sensible ideas,” Weaver said. “They're asking the right questions, and we're very aware of the problem.”
In fact, FWP staff were on their way to the lake Monday, to take a look and get a firsthand whiff of what might be done.
Weaver's office just doesn't have the staff to clean up all the dead grayling, even though they were the ones who put them there. And changing state fishing regulations or stocking a new brood lake are solutions that will take time.
“All the fisheries folks and fishermen are up for the party and pats on the back when the grayling have a successful spawn and the fishing is killer,” Schiess said, “but no one wants to deal with the ill effects when the management experiment goes wrong.”
And so every summer's day, the Schiesses scrub the fresh slime out of their pink canoe, rinse the boat in the lake, and head out again to brave the stench.
“Oh you can smell it,” she said. “You can smell it from a mile away. It's just so awful. We could really use some help out here.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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