What a great Labor Day weekend!  We are now entering the season of many outdoor choices.

Outdoor recreationists are faced with the choices of hunting, fishing, hiking, swimming, cutting firewood or just soaking up some late summer sun.

My weekend started early with a fishing trip to Little Bitterroot Lake. I have not fished this lake in the summer for several years but I’ve heard great stories of good fishing for hard-fighting smallmouth bass. We won’t get into the story behind how smallmouth bass got into Little Bitterroot Lake, but they are there and apparently doing quite well.

A recent bass fishing tournament on this lake produced many five-fish limits of 15 to 16 pounds of fish. That’s an average of three pounds per fish. Smallmouth bass are a northern bass species that seems to thrive in the cooler waters of northern lakes.

They do much better than their largemouth bass cousins that seem to prefer warmer waters. But there also are largemouth bass in Little Bitterroot Lake.

Smallmouth bass are known to be, pound for pound, among the scrappiest fresh-water fish. Montana’s state smallmouth record is 6.7 pounds, caught in Fort Peck Reservoir. There also are some dandy smallmouth bass in the lower Flathead River and the Clark Fork River reservoirs.    

Advice from a local fish shop suggested using a drop sinker fishing technique.

This method uses a small round drop sinker on the bottom of your line with a hook tied about 15 inches above the sinker. I was told to use Gulp minnows for bait. You just flip this setup out from your boat and let it sink to the bottom. Then jig this setup towards the boat, a foot or so at a time.

The sinker keeps the bait deep in the water column but not on the bottom. This technique didn’t work for us. We could see both the bait and fish in the clear water of Little Bitterroot Lake. We started using white Gulp minnows. Fish would come and nose the bait but wouldn’t bite. So we switched to black-and-silver Gulp minnows but still no bites. We then smeared on some shrimp oil lure. Still no bites. We then tied on Gulp night crawlers. Still no bites.

We switched to our old kokanee standby of trolling leaded core line and small chartreuse-colored Triple Teasers. We let out about two colors to get the lure down to a depth of 12 to 15 feet. Within five minutes, my wife caught a nice kokanee salmon. Then she caught a second salmon, then a nice smallmouth bass. After JoAnn had three kokanee and two smallies in the boat, she was kind enough to let me catch some fish.

One thing that surprised me about Little Bitterroot Lake is the extensive submerged weed beds. These weeds look like prime lake habitat for producing fish food and good fish habitat for warm-water fish species. We ended the day with enough fish for a couple of meals and released other fish. It was a cloudless day in the 70s. A perfect day to be fishing and the start of a Labor Day weekend.

Labor Day dawned with partially sunny skies, so we decided to try our luck at some grouse hunting. We didn’t see a bird. Grouse populations are known to be very cyclic, with about a seven-year cycle from great abundance to scarcity, so I don’t know if we are on the bottom end of a grouse cycle or had bad spring weather for chick survival or perhaps we are just poor hunters. Anyway, it was fun to get out hunting.

I did find a couple of dead standing larch and pine trees that made for a truckload of firewood for our cabin. JoAnn accuses me of watching more for good firewood trees than grouse.  

Overall, a fun weekend of activities in the great Flathead Outdoors. This Saturday our outdoor choices increase as archery season opens for deer and elk. Enjoy the bountiful early fall outdoor season.