Is it spring yet?
Man, what a winter. I don't know about you, but I trashed a perfectly good snow shovel this year, and when it finally broke, about three storms before winter finally quit (maybe?), I just started to ignore the white stuff.
Even as a write this on the last day of March, new snow blankets the front yard. It's a also a Monday, so wandering upstairs to grab that first cup of coffee this morning was punctuated by the vision of an inch of fresh snow covering the grass. I should have just gone back to bed.
I've also got that late winter, early spring perma-cough- that cold that doesn't quite knock you on your butt, but also keeps you from being perfectly square with the world. The other night, watching television with my family, something funny happened and I laughed twice and then broke into an hour long coughing fit.
Maybe I'm just getting old. I used to relish winter fly fishing for the solitude and the surprisingly good angling, especially here in southeast Idaho, where some streams, in my opinion, never fish better than they do after you've walked a bit through a foot of fresh powder to get to them. Now, it takes a virtual guarantee of productive fishing to even get me out of the house when the mercury rests in the bottom third the thermometer.
Thankfully, I haven't lost all winter angling desire-I would have missed out on a epic day on the Snake near Jackson Hole this winter if I'd been too discouraged by a little blowing snow. And, thankfully, my fellow Angler fishing enthusiasts haven't been dissuaded by winter the northern Rockies either.
Corey Fisher, for instance, shares some of the secrets to a growing mania in western Montana-the skwala stonefly hatch is developing a following. Take a look at Corey's feature on the first big bug of the season, and make your plans, if not this year, then next. Soon, the skwala won't be a secret at all.
Tom Reed, too, got out this winter on southern Montana's Bighorn, where he and his buddies fooled a few beefy browns and some equally impressive rainbows before the weather got too bad. Over in southwest Idaho, the Boise River should fish really well this spring before it's blown out by what promises to be significant snowmelt from the mountains above town. The nice thing about the Boise, though, is that runoff ends quickly and the fishing stays good, almost all year long. Throw in those early "inner tube hatches" and the Boise State co-eds who float down the river in bikinis, and the urban fishery can be quite the angling experience.
Enjoy this first issue of the Angler for 2008... and drop us a line at chris@flyfishscribe.com and let us know how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.

Chris Hunt
Editor