Issue No. 6 · Week of August 10, 2026 · The Weekly Lowdown
Five weeks of ridge and smoke end this week. Thursday tops out around 80 — twenty-two degrees off last Friday's peak — and the monsoon comes in behind it with a 70 percent chance of thunderstorms. Cooler water, longer windows, and a new hazard to plan around. The tailwater is at 4.69 cfs and it is still the best moving water in the county.
The pattern that has run this valley since the Fourth of July is finally
done. The four-corners ridge that gave us 102 on Friday is breaking down,
a weak trough is building along the coast, and the forecast office is
calling for a steady cooling trend Tuesday through Friday with high
confidence. Today reaches the low 90s. Wednesday drops to the upper 80s.
Thursday tops out around 80, and Thursday night falls into
the mid 40s. That is a twenty-two degree swing off last week's peak in six
days, and it changes what is fishable and when.
What comes in behind it is the monsoon. Scattered thunderstorms arrive
Wednesday after midnight at a 50 percent chance, then Thursday goes to
70 percent — scattered in the morning, numerous in the
afternoon — and Friday holds at 50 with showers into the evening.
The Elko forecast discussion flags moderate to locally brief heavy rainfall
Wednesday afternoon and evening, with WPC expanding its excessive rainfall
outlook northward over us. Storm motions are slow, seven to fourteen knots,
which is the part that matters: slow storms drop their water in one
place.
So the trade this week is a real one. The heat that has kept us to a
dawn-only schedule since early July is gone, water temperatures will come
down, and for the first time in a month the middle of the day and the last
hour of light are both worth fishing. In exchange you get lightning over
the high country most afternoons, and you get rain falling on ground that
burned three weeks ago. Neither of those is a reason to stay home. Both are
reasons to have a plan for where you go when the sky stands up.
On fire, the news is better than it has been since the Fourth of July, and
we checked it fresh this morning rather than carrying last week's numbers
forward. The Secret Pass Fire is 100 percent contained at 3,300
acres. Chimney, Boyd, Long Canyon and Hoppie Basin are long off
the report. There is no active large fire anywhere in Elko County, and the
Humboldt-Toiyabe has no closure posted for the Ruby Mountains district —
the first clean week we have been able to print all summer. Two things
still apply: fire danger is rated High on the Mountain
City-Ruby Mountains-Jarbidge districts, and the Ward Fire down by Ely just
produced a brand-new area closure. Details in the Native Waters note.
The water itself has not been rescued, and nobody should read a cool week as
a wet one. The tailwater below the dam is at 4.69 cfs,
down about 14 percent in the nine days since the last issue. Lamoille Creek
is at 3.18 cfs, which is below its lowest recorded flow for August
11 in ninety years of record. A half inch of thunderstorm rain does
not fix that; it just muddies it for a day. Fish the cool, take the longer
windows the weather is handing you, and keep treating these creeks like the
drought-year water they are.
Still the one that matters, and this is its best week since June. Gauge 10320000 read 4.69 cfs and 2.19 feet at 3:55 this morning against a median of 9.8 for August 11 — so 48 percent of median, below the 25th percentile of 6.4, but a long way above the 2.04 record low set in 2007. A number worth explaining before someone catches it. Last week we printed 39 percent of median; this week we print 48 percent on less water. Both are right. The denominator moved — the median for August 3 is 14 cfs, the median for August 11 is 9.8 — because the historical river drops faster in mid-August than ours is dropping right now. The percentage improved while the actual flow fell 14 percent. Read the cfs, not the percentage. What the weather does to this reach is the real story. At 4.69 cfs and gin clear it has been a dawn fishery, over by nine, for five straight weeks. Thursday's high of 80 and Friday's 81, with cloud cover on top, should hold water temperatures under the 67°F line most of the day for the first time since early July. Carry a thermometer and confirm it rather than assuming it — there is still no USGS temperature sensor on this gauge — but plan for a full day rather than a dawn raid. Fish it the same way regardless: long leaders, 6X, smaller than you want to tie on. Two feet of clear water does not forgive a heavy landing no matter how cool the air is. Rainbows commonly run 14 to 22 inches here, alongside bowcutt, wild browns, smallmouth and channel cat. Access is still the constraint. The state park's water runs a quarter mile past the spillway; that is the stretch you can count on. NDOW describes fishable water some twelve miles down to Hunter Banks Diversion, but ownership below the park boundary is a patchwork of BLM and private ranch, and Nevada has no high-water-mark access right. Know whose ground you are standing on.
The high lakes stay good and get a new problem. With the valley floor down in the 80s by Thursday the twenty-degree elevation advantage that has driven the last month of this newsletter mostly disappears — you are no longer climbing to escape heat. You climb now because the fish are there and the water is cool. The afternoon calculus inverts this week. For five weeks the rule was climb high and stay all day. Thursday and Friday it is the opposite: be up early, and be off the exposed shorelines and off the Ruby Crest ridgeline by early afternoon. Numerous thunderstorms Thursday afternoon at a 70 percent chance, over a granite cirque at 9,600 feet, with a two-mile walk back to the truck, is the single most dangerous thing in this issue. A graphite rod on an open shoreline above treeline is exactly what you think it is. Plan a morning, not a day. Fish first light to noon, watch the towers build to the south and west, and start down when they do rather than when the first strike lands. The Callibaetis hatch that made mid-morning worth staying for on the weedy margins is still coming off — you just have a harder deadline on the far end of it. One name to get straight, because it will scare people. If you see a "Ruby Fire" in a Nevada headline this week, it is not here. The Ruby Fire is in the Pine Nut Mountains in Douglas County, four hundred miles west of us, lightning-started on August 8 alongside the Double Fire. Nothing is burning in the Ruby Mountains. Access is clean, and this week we checked it properly rather than going on the absence of news: the Humboldt-Toiyabe alerts page lists no closure for the Ruby Mountains district, and the only current Elko-area order is the Stage 1 fire restriction that has run since June 10. Fire danger on the district is rated High. Call the Ruby Mountains Ranger District before a long drive anyway, and this week ask about storm damage on the way out as well.
The hardest number in this issue. Lamoille Creek is at 3.18 cfs. The lowest flow ever recorded at that gauge on August 11, in ninety water years of record, is 4.04 cfs in 2013. We are running roughly 20 percent under the record low for the date. Against a median of 14 that is 23 percent of normal, and it is down 16 percent from the 3.79 we printed nine days ago. That is not a fishery this month; it is a refuge. The trout in Lamoille Creek right now are stacked in whatever pools still hold cold water, and a stream at record-low flow has no capacity to absorb a bad release. Our recommendation is to leave it alone until fall. We have fished it and written it up every week this summer and we are not going to keep doing that while the gauge reads this. The mainstem near Elko is the week's one piece of genuinely improved news, and it is a low bar. It reads 0.45 cfs and 0.81 feet — five times what it was on August 3, when it was down to 0.09. Against the August 11 median of 6.4 that is still only 7 percent. Almost certainly irrigation return flow rather than any real recovery, the values are provisional, and 0.45 cfs is a chain of connected puddles. It does not become a fishery this week. One more thing about the storms. Rain on this ground runs off rather than soaking in. Expect the small tributaries to spike and go the color of chocolate milk for a day after any real cell, and expect that to happen with no warning from a gauge, because most of them do not have one.
Read this before you point the truck at the Snake Range. The Humboldt-Toiyabe signed a new area closure on August 10 — yesterday — for the Ward Fire on Ward Mountain, about nine miles south of Ely. Forest Order 04-17-26-09-02 closes National Forest System lands, roads and trails on the entire Ely Ranger District within White Pine County, in effect from noon August 10 through September 1. It supersedes the earlier order. Entering a closed area is a Class B misdemeanor, so this is not a suggestion. The Ward Fire was around 8,700 acres and roughly two-thirds contained in the most recent reporting we could find, up from 1,800 acres and zero containment on August 1. Ely Ranger District: 775-289-3031. What this does and does not cover: the order applies to Forest Service ground. Great Basin National Park is National Park Service land and is not closed by this order, and the closure does not reach private inholdings or state and county roads inside the boundary. But the approach to a lot of Snake Range water crosses Ely District ground, and the map is the map. Call before you commit a four-hour drive, and do not assume last month's route is open. The Jarbidge is the better answer this week anyway. Cooler air and cloud cover mean the redband and Bonneville cutthroat will look up all day instead of for two hours at dawn, and these small high streams respond faster to an air-temperature drop than anything down in the valley. The road is the whole risk this week. The Charleston-Jarbidge Road, CR748, was open as of our August 3 reporting with county crews planning work on downed trees — but that was before a week with three straight days of thunderstorms in the forecast. Slow storms dropping heavy rain on steep unpaved county road is how that country strands people. If you are going in Thursday or Friday, go in knowing you may not come out the same day, and tell somebody where you parked. Do not trust the community road-conditions page that ranks first in search — it was last updated in 2021. Call Elko County Roads at 775-738-5036, or the Mountain City-Ruby Mountains-Jarbidge Ranger District, and call the morning you leave rather than the night before. Stage 1 fire restrictions still run through October 31 on both the Humboldt-Toiyabe and the BLM Elko District, and a wet week does not lift them. The two agencies word the equipment rule differently — the Forest Service wants chainsaw and similar work completed by 1 PM, BLM restricts internal combustion equipment 1 PM to 1 AM. Campfires only in developed sites. Bull trout in the Jarbidge go straight back in the water.
The fly the weather just handed back to us. Evening spinner falls have been irrelevant all summer because nobody was on the water at 8 PM in a hundred degrees. With highs in the low 80s and lows in the 40s, the last hour of light is fishable again — and the flat calm behind a passing cell is the best spinner water you will get all year. Fish it dead drift in the film on the tailwater flats.
The workhorse for two feet of clear tailwater. At 4.69 cfs the fish are holding in the few seams with any current left and they will not chase. Hang it short off a small dry on 6X, keep the whole rig quiet, and go to a #20 before you change patterns. Bead it lightly or not at all — you are fishing eighteen inches of water, not four feet.
A Nevada fly for Nevada water, tied on the creek it is named for north of here, and still the most underrated stillwater pattern in the Great Basin. Peacock and mallard, worked slow along the weed edges at Ruby Lake and the Ruby high lakes. Cooling water has fish moving back into the shallows to feed — this is the fly for that.
Specifically for the day after a storm. When a slow cell dumps on a drainage the small water goes off-color and the delicate stuff stops working — that is when a fat flashy attractor earns its place. Fish it on the bottom in the seams and the pocket water while the creek is still stained, then put it away when it clears.
We have spent five weeks sending you uphill to get away from heat. This is the week to go the other direction, because the reason to climb just evaporated and the refuge is a better place to be under a thunderstorm than a granite cirque is. The Collection Ditch is spring-fed, and that is the whole point: it runs off the same aquifer that feeds the marsh, so it is thermally steady in a way that nothing on a gauge in this county is right now. While Lamoille Creek sits below its ninety-year record low, this water is doing roughly what it does every August. Bonneville cutthroat and largemouth work the weed edges, and cooling air will push them shallower through the week. An hour and change south of Elko down Ruby Valley, so it is a commitment, but it is low, it is sheltered, and if the sky stands up you are near the truck rather than two miles above it. Fish a Sheep Creek Special slow along the weed lines, and know the refuge boating rules before you launch anything — see the first field note.
One email a week — the bite, the water, the wind, and where to point the truck.
Fish the cool, respect the thunder. — Great Basin Flyfisher
Questions, tips, or a report from the water? info@greatbasinflyfisher.com
Great Basin Flyfisher