LOLO — It’s a Montana moment in late August, and the smell of decaying whitefish, suckers and crawdads dominates the last mile of a dusty creek bed in western Montana. Pools of standing water linger, but they’re drying up too fast to offer more than a dead end to the remaining fish. Vultures are circling overhead.

His boots crunching across the streambed, Jed Whiteley noted it’s certainly not the first time Lolo Creek has run dry before reaching the Bitterroot River. As of Tuesday, the creek petered out just past the Highway 93 bridge in a patchwork of shallow water, fish carcasses and exposed streambed. But it's the worst he's seen since at least 2017, the year of the Lolo Peak Fire.

“You get a big dry-out like this, and you’ve just wiped out an entire year’s class of fish and macroinve

See Full Page