Peter Heller is a contributing editor at National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men’s Journal. He is the author of The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals and Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River. His forthcoming book Kook, A Memoir will be published in the spring of 2010. He lives in Denver.

Excerpt:

In a drought year, by late June or early July the creek is already showing
its bones. Fallen trees, which usually sift a swift current, lie resting out
of water, propped up on dry rocks. Gravel bars split the bends. The rapids
channel, exposing wastes of rounded stones. The current slows and warms.
The mullein is crumbly dry, the willows slack. I wade in ankle-deep riffles
and it’s easier and sadder to fish, because the trout are concentrated into the
few deep pools and are hungry. They must be stressed by the rising temperature
as well. They don’t fight with the vigor or confidence of the ice-water
evenings when the canyon was pumping. They give up.

I notice more elk and deer tracks in the silt along water’s edge—they
must be stressed too, having to drop down farther to drink. The wind still
stirs downstream after dusk and still carries the pungent scent of the forest,
but it is a warmer fragrance, dryer, not fresh, and I miss the scent of cold
stone. It’s as if the country is gasping for a deluge. In those seasons, I put up
my rod earlier and pray most of the fish will make it and hope for fall rain.

The scientists say that these summers, and ones like the drought of
1988, will become more frequent and more severe. The climate models for
the West in the coming decades are not sanguine. I think how the high
snowpack is the heart of this country, how it fills and pumps the networks
of rivers and creeks that cascade out of the hills and nourish everything.
How one doesn’t really need models and statistics; it’s clear that the warmer
winters and earlier springs don’t bode well. I can hardly bear the thought of
the watersheds drying up.