CASPER, Wyo. (AP) – August 1988 was the hottest, driest month Meredith Taylor could remember. That was the year the Yellowstone National Park fires began, eventually burning more than 2 million acres.

Her husband, Tory Taylor, drew a bighorn sheep license, and the couple rode their horses into base camp in the Wind River Range. They'd been there many times before and ran a successful outfitting business out of Dubois.

Meredith knew that the Wind River glaciers, some of the biggest in the Rocky Mountains, were shrinking. But she didn't expect what she saw: All the snow had melted off the glaciers not far from Gannett Peak, leaving sheets of dark ice colored by dirt and dust. It was so dry, the Taylors couldn't find any snow to cover half of Tory's bighorn sheep carcass. They packed half back to camp immediately and tucked the other half between a glacier and rock. When they returned the next day, blow flies had already found the sheep.

Hotter summers and winters were a problem, Meredith knew, but these kinds of changes were personal, not just cautionary articles in scientific journals.

The Taylors thought about a future in which the glaciers would continue to fade, the pika would move higher and whitebark pine would dwindle.

“The glaciers are attractive to people, but the things that will affect people most, it's the climate changing,” said Daniel Fagre, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in the Northern Rockies.

The glacial melt is a visual barometer of a warming climate. Less snow will mean more frequent wildfires, fewer fish and displaced game herds, possibly hurting Wyoming's tourism industry, which creates 25,000 jobs and brings $1 billion to the state each year, according to Wyoming's economic analysis division.

As the glaciers continue to recede, experts predict water levels will lower and temperatures will rise, harming trout migration as well as survival. Some outdoor enthusiasts have already seen a difference in Wyoming's big game habitat.

George Hunker compares watching glaciers retreat to noticing a child grow. When you're with an infant every day, you don't notice the changes in size. But, for a grandparent who only sees a child every six months, the difference is startling.

The Lander man has spent summers in the Wind Rivers for the past 40 years -- first leading courses for the National Outdoor Leadership School, later as a fly-fishing guide. He doesn't notice yearly changes in the big glaciers, but thinks the small ones will someday be gone completely.

Has the glacial retreat affected the fisheries he's spent his life working in? Hunker isn't sure. He's noticed there are more algae blooms in the high lakes than it seemed like there were 30 years ago. But he's not sure whether those blooms, which can spell doom for trout, are caused by warming water or something else.

No one really knows.

Art Shoutis, a limnologist with both the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes on the Wind River Indian Reservation, said there's still much data that needs to be collected and analyzed. A limnologist studies inland waters and their organisms, and Shoutis spent the summers of 2001 and 2002 in the Wind River Range high country studying the glacier-fed lakes.

One of the impacts of warmer glacier water could be a drop in golden trout, which depend on the simple organisms that live in the very cold alpine lakes, frozen roughly nine months of the year. As the lakes warm, the organisms could die and be replaced by other plant life, Shoutis said.

When their food dies, the goldens could die, too.

David Skates, a biologist and project supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the loss of glaciers will affect the fish populations, both high in the mountains and down in the valleys.

The glaciers feed many of the mountain lakes late in the season. The glacial water maintains streams in between the lakes which allow trout to migrate and spawn.

If those late-season flows are gone, fish such as brook trout may spawn and hatch, Skates said. “But they may not survive if the system runs out before they're large enough to migrate into the deeper holes.”

Skates also worries about the inevitable competition for water between irrigators and those interested in fish.

“It's going to be some interesting times for late-season flows in the Wind River area and the other side of the range,” Skates said.

When Richard Baldes hunts antelope on the Wind River Indian Reservation, near the base of the mountains, he sees dry patches of land that were wetlands just 10 to 15 years ago.

“What the glaciers help, is to prolong the amount of water that comes down at the end of the season,” said Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone hunter and former biologist and project leader for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

If streams lose late-season water, especially during a drought, what happens to the wetlands? And what happens to the wildlife the wetlands support?

They will move somewhere else, Baldes said.

On the Wind River side of the range, there are more than 13,000 elk, roughly 20,000 mule deer, 400 moose and about 30,000 antelope, said Tom Ryder, wildlife management coordinator for the Lander office of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Another several hundred, if not thousand, of each animal are on the Wind River reservation.

“All these aspects of global climate change, especially the lack of water ... will definitely have an impact on wildlife,” he said.

In 2009 in Fremont County, east of the Continental Divide, more than 5,000 hunters tried for elk alone. Hunters in that region contributed roughly $7.3 million to the state in revenue, according to Game and Fish's annual report.

Some species, such as moose, bighorn sheep and grizzly bears, are living in the southern edge of their habitat right now. They depend on the colder weather and harsher winters for survival. As cold weather moves north, replaced with warmer temperatures, these animals will follow the cold.

Baldes, who's also an irrigator, believes people will need to improve their own methods of irrigating, watering more efficiently and leaving more in the streams.

It won't kill wildlife populations like it may harm fish, Skates said.

“Wildlife will move to wherever the food source and better habitat is,” Skates said. “If our glaciers go away in the next 50 years, will there still be streams? Yeah. Will they still be as active or as perennially active as they were? Probably not.'