Seeking Teachers & Students to Work as2-Week Summer Field Evaluators for theButte Reclamation Evaluation System (BRES)

The CFWEP is seeking interested teachers and students to work in paid positions as summer field evaluators on Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit reclaimed sites. Five selected teachers and five selected students (high school, undergraduate or graduate level) will have the opportunity to collect monitoring data about the reclaimed Butte environment and gain valuable experience in practical field science. Participating teachers will also have the opportunity to earn OPI renewal credits.

• Participants will receive a one-week (Mon-Fri) BRES field evaluation training and become certified BRES field evaluators.
• Teacher-student pairs will each perform a field evaluation of BPSOU sites for a one-week (Mon-Fri) period.
• Teacher-student pairs will be responsible for inputting their week of field data into the BRES database. Database entry will be on the Monday after the end of each pair’s evaluation week.
• Teachers will be required to prepare a data summary report of their week in the field with their student; students will be required to assist in preparation of summary report and to perform one or both of the following tasks: prepare a summary report of their experience; and/or develop a science fair/research project using the skills and expertise gained in the summer experience.
• As an addendum to the summary report, teachers will be required to submit one lesson plan and/or field activity curriculum product to be used in their classroom based upon their experience.
• CFWEP staff will provide technical support and assistance throughout the project.
• All necessary equipment will be provided.
• Each participating teacher will receive a stipend of $1,500. Up to 40 OPI renewal units are available and offered free of charge.
• Each participating student will receive a stipend of $750.
• The deadline for applications is Thursday, June 5th, with successful applicants notified no later than Friday, June 6th. Training will be held during the following week, June 9th-13th. Teacher-student pairs will then be assigned dates to conduct field evaluations based on availability and BRES requirements.

To apply:
Contact Justin Ringsak, CFWEP Public Education Coordinator, at 406.496.4897, or email jringsak@mtech.edu.

Identifying Montana Trout

This blog entry comes to you courtesy of Bader Consulting, mbader@montana.com, with fish art copyright Joseph Tomelleri, courtesy Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.


The Bull Trout (Salvelinus confluentus) is Montana's largest migratory trout and is protected as a Threatened Species. The Montana record is 26 pounds, yet even larger fish are likely. In late Summer bull trout begin epic spawning journeys up to 100 miles. They are sensitive to changes in habitat and require colder, cleaner water than other native fish.


The Westslope Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi) is classified as a "sensitive" species in Montana. Once abundant, "pure strain" cutthroat (not inter-bred with other species) are now restricted to 5% of their former range. They are most often located in headwaters streams and high mountain lakes. The state record is 16 pounds from Red Eagle Lake.


Rainbow Trout (Oncoryhnchus mykiss) are relatively abundant in Montana's cold water rivers, streams and lakes. Their name comes from the colorful stripe running the length of the body. The Montana record is 33 pounds, from the Kootenai River. Rainbows often interbreed with cutthroat trout. The record hybrid is 33 pounds from Ashely Lake.


Brown Trout (Salmo trutta), also known as the German Brown, is a large trout which spawns in the fall. They take their name from the brown-yellow color of their bodies. Attaining large size, the Montana record is a 29 pound fish from Wade Lake.


The Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) is a non-native fish and the smallest of the trout species. The Montana record is 9 pounds from Lower Two Medicine Lake. They are most often found in smaller tributary streams. Brook trout have displaced native trout from the lower reaches of many streams. Since they are chars, they can interbreed with native bull trout, often resulting in sterile offspring.

Use These Good Trout Fishing Practices:

Know Your Fish
Know the regulations for your location
Use single, barbless hooks
Avoid fishing in hot weather & high water temps
Practice quick release techniques

For More Information, visit:

http://fwp.mt.gov/education/fishingeducation

www.sierraclub.org/sierrasportsmen

Volunteers of the Month Marko Lucich & Tom Malloy

Ahoy, CFWEP followers! The program is pleased to announce its newest honoree as Volunteer of the Month. First of all, let’s be clear, the “of the month” designation has lost its punctuality, and even though we will continue to call it our “VOM” award, it will be given out on a more “every other month” basis. The “Volunteer of the Every Other Month Award” just doesn’t have a great ring to it, though, considering this is coming from the already unwieldy acronym “CFWEP.”

This month, the CFWEP has decided to give our prestigious award to two individuals for the first time. Congratulations to the Butte Chamber of Commerce’s Marko Lucich and Tom Malloy of Butte-Silver Bow City-County as Co-Volunteers of the Month!

Marko is the director of the Butte Chamber and has graciously provided his Visitors Center on George Street, free of charge, as a first-stop for visiting classrooms to The Mining City, not to mention the headquarters for the CFWEP’s volunteer training workshops. Marko also gives the CFWEP the key to the Berkeley Pit Viewing Stand, allowing us to bring students to the area’s favorite Superfund site all through the year.

Tom is an environmental engineer and the Reclamation Manager for Butte-Silver Bow City-County. Tom has been volunteering with the CFWEP in various capacities for the past few years. Particularly, in the last few months, he has arranged for two middle and elementary school classroom visits to the Anselmo Mine hoist house and mine yard, hosted an environmental studies group from Billings on a tour of Butte restoration sites and, most recently, spent a day in the field with 75 Butte seventh graders on Silver Bow Creek, no easy feat for anyone.

The CFWEP greatly depends on the expertise and cooperation of professional scientists like Mr. Malloy and the flexibility and generosity of local citizens like Marko and his organization in order to successfully continue its educational endeavors with the youth of the Upper Clark Fork Basin. Thank you very much, Tom and Marko! 

How Much Fish Does a Fish Hawk Eat? - Osprey & Citizen Science in the Clark Fork

Well, it depends. But for interested high school students and folks from the Upper Clark Fork, they’ll soon be able to give you an exact answer.

The Clark Fork Watershed Education Program has teamed up with researchers at the University of Montana to provide what will be an awesome experience for the public: to take part in an important field project over the next few months to help determine the effects of mercury on the area’s osprey population. There will be two public meetings to provide more information and to recruit “citizen scientists” for the project:

-Tuesday, April 29 in Deer Lodge at the St. Mary's Center

-Wednesday, April 30 in Drummond at the School/Community Library

Both meetings start at 5:30 p.m. The meetings will last around 1 ½ hours and will include a brief presentation followed by a trip to a local osprey nest for a field training on collecting observation data. Once recruited, “citizen scientists” are expected to make one trip per week to their assigned nest to collect data over the next 3-4 weeks. The data will be then be provided to the University of Montana for their ongoing research project.

Those who sign up to volunteer with the project will be included in the sampling trips in mid-June to mid-July, where osprey chicks will be brought down from the nest, banded for identification and blood sampled for mercury analysis at a lab. Optional involvement includes a trip to the laboratory in Missoula at the UM campus and technical support.

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus), or “fish hawks,” are commonly observed near Montana’s lakes, reservoirs and rivers. They are migratory, with the Clark Fork population arriving in April and departing in October for wintering grounds in Central and South America. They are especially important as a “canary in the coalmine” species for determining river health. Unlike eagles and other hawks, the diet of the osprey consists entirely of fish, unless it’s absolutely necessary to seek other prey such as small mammals and reptiles. They feed primarily on “rough” fish, such as suckers and whitefish, although trout and other species are consumed regularly.

The amount of fish osprey eat is largely determined by whether they are feeding their young and by the distance they must travel from their nesting area to the river or food source, but typically they feed twice per day. Most fish caught by the flying fisherman range in size from 5 to 16 inches, although the osprey can heft fish weighing 4 pounds occasionally. Though very rare, there are instances when an osprey has drowned upon “hooking into” a fish too large to lift, being pulled underneath.

As the king of the river food web, they are an excellent indicator of what contaminants are present in the river system. When DDT and other harmful pesticides were legally used, the osprey population was nearly decimated. Their numbers bounced back and now they are being studied with respect to the effects mercury has upon them. Mercury, found primarily in the sediments of streams, accumulate in all species of a river ecosystem. Used heavily in historic gold placer mining operations, mercury is deposited primarily from contamination in the atmosphere. The liquid element, known as “quicksilver,” is a highly toxic substance to the nervous, digestive and reproduction systems of many species, including humans.

To learn more about the project, please contact Justin Ringsak, Montana Tech at (406) 496-4897, jringsak@mtech.edu, or Erick Greene, University of Montana, (406) 243-2179.

A couple of cool osprey sites to visit:
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks http://fieldguide.mt.gov/detail_ABNKC01010.aspx
The Bird Web: http://birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?id=96

Flowing Water: The Milltown Dam Breach and the Restoration of the Clark Fork River

On Friday, March 28th, near Missoula, the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers flowed freely past the remnants of the Milltown Dam for the first time in over a century. The earthen dam above the flat ground where the dam powerhouse once stood was breached near high noon, and the water wasted no time in following the path of least resistance through a shallow channel into the powerhouse flats and on down the Clark Fork River, where it undoubtedly continued flowing through northwestern Montana, into Idaho, pausing for a time at lake Pend Oreille, then finally moving on to the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. While the breach has garnered considerable media attention, the real story is not the breach itself, but the history and context that led a community to spend an ocean of time and money to unmake what our history made.

Hundreds of people turned out to witness the breach on a chilly spring day, braving the icy slopes of a steep bluff to catch a glimpse of water in motion. To understand the significance of the dam breach, and why the crowd came, requires some knowledge of the history of the dam and the Clark Fork River. This story has been sadly overlooked in most media coverage, and without it, the dam breach could seem like a dog-and-pony show. "What’s the big deal?" the uninitiated might ask.

The big deal is mining, and copper, and electricity. Today, more than a century removed from the dark old days of pre-electrification, it is easy for us to take the power lighting our homes and revving up our armies of gadgetry for granted. But our brave new world came with a staggering cost, and the Milltown Dam and the Clark Fork River were a part of it.

As demand for copper soared in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, due significantly to its use in the transmission of electricity and also in war-related applications, 120 miles upstream from Milltown, the city of Butte was bustling. Men risked their lives for the prospect of a good paycheck to pull as much copper out of the ground as was humanly possible. The underground tunnels required lots of timber supports, and the process of extracting copper from raw ore through heap roasting and, later, smelting and concentrating also demanded wood to fuel the fires. As a result, William Clark, one of the three legendary Copper Kings, the mining barons of Butte, built a mill at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers. Milltown was born.

To power the mill and to produce electricity for his utility that served the cities of Milltown and Missoula with an electric streetcar system, Clark built a dam along with it, the same dam that is generating so much interest these days. The dam was barely finished when a 1908 flood of epic proportions, some call it a 100-year flood, some say a 500-year flood, struck the Clark Fork River.

To understand what happened next, we need to understand the situation upstream in Butte and Anaconda in 1908. Mining and smelting had been going full-tilt for decades. While the ore mined in Butte at the time was high-grade, sometimes approaching 30% copper, the mines still generated huge amounts of waste. The most prominent form of mine waste was tailings, the fine-grained, sand-like sediment that is a byproduct of the milling and concentrating process. Rich in sulfides, heavy metals and arsenic, when mixed with water and oxygen tailings render sulfuric acid, which further mobilizes metals and arsenic into solution at toxic levels, through a chemical process known as acid mine drainage. At the time, these tailings were simply discharged into the nearest convenient creek. Acid mine drainage was not a concern- maximizing copper production was. In Butte, Silver Bow Creek turned into an industrial sewer, with tailings spread out over the floodplain. In Anaconda, tailings from similar operations were dumped into Warm Springs Creek and also spread throughout the southern end of the Deer Lodge Valley. Both creeks sit at the headwaters of the Clark Fork River.

The 1908 flood picked up a massive amount of tailings and other mining wastes and washed it down the Clark Fork. Throughout the Deer Lodge Valley, some tailings settled in the floodplain, resulting in small patches of dead soil called "slickens" where vegetation is unable to grow. Past the town of Deer Lodge, the Clark Fork’s channel narrows as it enters a series of canyons running northwest to Missoula. The narrow channel means faster water, so less tailings waste settled out in these stretches than in the wide-open Deer Lodge Valley. Instead, these tailings were swept up in the swift current until they backed up against the Milltown Dam. About 8 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment were deposited behind the dam. The structure itself was almost washed away in the flood, and Clark had to send miners from Butte, well versed in explosives, to dynamite out the spillway so that the whole thing, powerhouse and all, would not be washed away.

And those tailings have remained at the dam until the past year. The current dam removal and restoration project, carried out beneath the umbrella of numerous federal and state agencies under the banner of the Superfund law and implemented by Envirocon, a private company, is removing the most toxic of that sediment. Every day since last October, trainloads of the stuff have been making the trip to their new home back upstream just outside of Anaconda near Opportunity, where they are unloaded and spread out over the top of the 160 million or so cubic yards of tailings that are already there, a legacy of the big old smelter stack that still stands over Anaconda, casting a long shadow that stretches out to every light switch and electrical socket in the country.

The good news is that the contaminated sediment being shipped from Milltown to Opportunity is considerably less nasty than the stuff that is already there. Because the tailings deposited at Milltown have been underwater in the Clark Fork River for a century, organic matter and other sediments carried by the river were mixed in, rendering the Milltown tailings sediments richer and with a lower acidity and concentration of metals. The state and federal cleanup crews' hope for Opportunity is that the Milltown sediments will serve as a cap, allowing vegetation to grow over the top of the Opportunity tailings, providing a barrier to infiltration into area groundwater and a cap to minimize blowing dust problems.

The motives for the dam removal are directly tied to the tailings deposited at its base. In 1981, arsenic was found in Milltown groundwater. It had infiltrated from the tailings deposit, and posed a human health risk via residents wells used for drinking water. The dam also was problematic for fish, particularly bull trout, listed as a federally threatened species in 1998, as it blocked significant migratory routes from the Lower to Upper Clark Fork, and the reservoir behind the dam created prime habitat for non-native, predatory pike. There were also concerns that the dam was old and decaying, fears that were magnified by an ice jam event near the dam in the mid 1990’s. Compounded, these reasons added up to the ongoing dam removal.

And last month’s breach was only a part of the overall restoration of not only the dam site, but the entire Clark Fork Basin. Upstream, the restoration of Silver Bow Creek continues. The Opportunity site, formerly known as the ponds, now affectionately referred to as the BP-Arco Waste Repository, looms, and we are left to watch and wait and hope that sprouts will appear in the new layer of Milltown sediment. Across I-90 from Opportunity, the Warm Springs Ponds, where lime is added to the waters of Silver Bow Creek to reduce its acidity and cause heavy metals to drop out, remain a question mark. In the short term, the ponds have become excellent waterfowl habitat, but the future of that site, like so much of the Clark Fork, is unclear.

In other words, restoration is not a one-day celebration. The dam breach, while certainly a pivotal moment in the history of the basin, is only a small step toward a healthy river system, toward undoing the damages a century of careless progress wrought. We are all culpable for those damages, so long as we continue to enjoy electricity, and we all share part of the moral obligation to preserve and restore this high wild river basin. And, make no mistake about it, restoration is no simple matter. It will take money and hard work to return the Clark Fork to a healthy ecosystem, and, more than anything, it will take time.

The crowd that came out for the dam breach greeted the free-flowing waters of the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot with cheers and rapt attention. It was inspirational to see so many so invested in the restoration. If the restoration of the Clark Fork, America’s largest Superfund site, is to succeed, then we must maintain our focus and our respect for these wild places, and make those values a foundation of our Montana culture. The dam breach is a good start. We should take strength from it. There is still much work to be done.

Queer Spots In and About Butte: Chapter 1

When it comes to learning about one's watershed, it is impossible to fully understand without history. What a watershed this Upper Clark Fork is and has been!
The Anaconda Standard recognized Butte’s rich history long before anyone else ever did. Beginning on March 18, 1906, the Butte newspaper, printed in Anaconda and formerly owned by the late Marcus Daly, began running a weekly column in its Sunday editions: Queer Spots In and About Butte. Let’s be clear, “queer” had yet to establish its colloquial definition in 1906; the writers were more likely using the dictionary's explanation: differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal . Live here and look around for long and you'll agree.
The first story in this interesting series featured the history of The Mining City’s precipitating plants, those being the plants that extracted copper from the metals-rich mine waters of which there were plenty by taking advantage of a simple chemical replacement reaction. Under the acid condition of Butte’s mine runoff, contaminated water flowing over tin cans and scrap iron would dissolve those metals into solution and leave behind almost pure copper.
It was a very simple method of making a lot of money without having to invest too much capital. Montana Resources still uses the exact same “technology” today, pumping Berkeley Pit water and stripping it of its copper content to the tune of about 450,000 pounds per month. At over $3 a pound, you do the math. If your curiosity is piqued, be on notice: We'll do an entire blog on the inaugural Queer Spots story detaling precipitation plants in the future.
The following Queer Spots column, No. 32, is one of my favorites relative to the Clark Fork River. It features Silver Bow Creek and the watershed’s geographic history. Published on October 21, 1906, this is arguably some of the best insight regarding Butte’s home water and the Columbia River's northeastern headwaters. It was printed only 42 years after the first discovery of gold on Silver Bow Creek (1864).
Enjoy the rich rhetorical language of early 20th century journalism and listen for the unmistakable "copper chorus". It’s a shame the newspaper didn’t pay tribute to the author with a by-line. (Note: Because of the story's original length, we will post the first half of it now and add the rest later...stay tuned!)


One of the most remarkable water courses of the state is the one which forms in the Summit valley, skirts the base of the richest mineral hill in the world, tumbles over worked-out placer beds which have yielded millions in gold, helps irrigate the farms in the Deer Lodge valley and then hurries away a thousand or more miles to the sea. That stream is known in this county as Silver Bow creek, and it is formed from the streams which have their sources in the main range of the Rockies which overlook the Summit valley. Throughout the entire valley, from the peaks which tower above the “Horseshoe” bend on the north to the Homestake and Pipestone passes to the south there are a number of little mountain streams, tossing their way through the valley to a common center, which is almost within the city limits of Butte. Principal among these streams are Blacktail Deer creek, Basin creek and Bison Creek, and they all meet to form Silver Bow creek where the Northern Pacific Railway company has its yards, just east of the site of the old Parrot Smelter.

A WINDING COURSE
As Silver Bow creek the water hurries along, keeping at the foot of the hill that has made Butte famous, and follows the natural valley in the foothills west of the town, passing over the old placer beds until a distance of eight miles below Butte is reached, when it plunges into a canyon, through which for a considerable part of the way there is no wagon road and where two railroads have wrestled with Dame Nature in some of her roughest moods in order to gain a thoroughfare. Once through the canyon, Silver Bow creek enters into the valley of the Deer Lodge and a few miles below it loses the name, which is famous the world over as the county in which Butte is located, and takes another, the Deer Lodge river, the contributions from the many side streams giving it a volume of water which justifies that distinction.

IN THE VALLEY
Through one of the fairest valleys in the state Deer Lodge river has its course, bountiful crops and grass meadows marking its way for nearly 30 miles, and again the foothills narrow down and there is almost a canyon. There is located Garrison and there the Little Blackfoot river adds its flow to the Deer Lodge river and the stream becomes known as Hell Gate. On down the valley, in more of a canyon than it is a valley, for nearly half a day’s travel by the fastest train, the stream keeps on its way until finally, just a few miles east of Missoula, the Big Blackfoot river comes rushing out of the mountains and adds its flow of pure water, crystal clear, to the murky tide which has come down from the mines and smelters of the Butte district, and the Missoula River is formed. By that name it is called during the rest of its journey through Montana, and it finally leaves the state at Cabinet to enter Idaho and afterwards lose its identity in Lake Pend d’Oreille. From this body of water the stream which was once known as Silver Bow creek emerges to be called Clark’s Fork of the Columbia and through the Columbia it finds its way into the Pacific Ocean – as a mighty river “rushing onward to the sea.”

THE STREAM'S HISTORY
Along every foot of Silver Bow Creek until it first loses its identity as the Deer Lodge river there are points of interest and historical reminiscences. From the place where the three little streamlets came together in the days when there was not a house to be seen in all of the valley until the present time, cherished memories have clung around the old creek. Time was when Silver Bow creek was a pretty one as it curled around the foot of the hill and dashed along the natural water course in the valley, singing merrily as it thought of the wonderful wealth of gold which it hoarded and which had been carried down from some place in the mountains so long ago that it had no recollection where or how it came to be gathered upon its bedrock. In the valley grass grew and the meadows were smiling and green. Mountain trout slept lazily in its deep pools and darted back and forth in the shallows seeking their food. The deer and antelope came to the creek's edge at evening time and drank fearlessly. Buffaloes laid about in the shade of the willows lazily during the heat of the day, or else, like the domestic cattle of today, they stood knee deep in the water, chewing their cuds contentedly.

"If it can be recalled, it can be restored."
This last description under THE STREAM'S HISTORY, provides a glimpse of what Silver Bow Creek may have resembled prior to the commencement of its use as an industrial sewer, a designation that despite the ongoing restoration efforts, still holds partly true today (Butte-Silver Bow's sewage treatment plant effluent, loaded with nutrients and ammonia, accounts for half of the stream's flow in the summer months).
Not to say we can reasonably count on seeing buffaloes lazily lounging along the Silver Bow Creek Greenway, this hindsight provides an important benchmark for the work to be done.

As ecologist Stephanie Mills states in her book In Service of the Wild, "If it can be recalled, it can be restored."

Check out the nice time lapse photo of Silver Bow Creek near Nissler that Justin Ringsak worked up at the CFWEP website (click here); and you can see raw comparison photos below. The first photo appeared in the Queer Spots of October 21, 1906; the second was taken in October of 2007 and shows the stream post restoration, albeit only a few years growth has established. It's worth noting that the 1906 photo shows a Silver Bow Creek that was hardly pristene; however, it's evident in comparison that the railroad has replaced the former course the stream once followed. (To be continued...)

Silver Bow Creek, looking west, 1906

Silver Bow Creek, looking west, 2007

Silver Bow Creek, looking west, 2007 (wider perspective)

Divides & Watersheds

Three indistinct, slightly blurred figures on inner tubes, lounging their way down a stretch of river. A photograph portraying an alien image, bright green water broken by brownish-red patches. Another photograph of water close-up, barely recognizable, scattering light so diffusely that it could be a painting done by the water itself. A 3-D mountain of reds and yellows, like something out of a sun-baked cartoon. A bulbous writhing mass entitled “It Came from the Berkeley Pit…” A painting of a “cosmic grayling” in many colors and a sort of northwest native style, against a backdrop of red fading to blue.

Those are just some of the nearly 30 art pieces at the Museum of Fine Arts Butte, 405 W Park St, until early November. The show is part of the 1st Annual (we hope) Divides & Watersheds Art Exhibition & Symposium, a public event jointly produced by CFWEP and the Butte-Silver Bow Arts Foundation designed to raise public awareness of regional restoration and watershed issues through art and education. The art exhibition opening reception on Friday, October 5th attracted a few hundred attendees throughout the evening, and the symposium on Saturday the 6th drew about 75 people over the course of the day.

Friday was all about celebrating regional art, and those artists’ perceptions of this last best place, both the untouched landscapes of Montana wilderness and the scarred vistas that provide a visible reminder that our actions have consequences, even those carried out under the good old names of civilization and progress. There was music, too, courtesy of local singer-songwriters Mike Tierney, Tim Mason, David Hobbs and Chad Okrusch. Okrusch and Hobbs’ original tune “The Great Divide” provided the perfect musical introduction for Divides & Watersheds, with the last line of its chorus trailing off into the distance, “…both sides of divide.”

Saturday shifted to a slightly more scientific gear, but a wide variety of film showings and readings gave the day a balanced rhythm. Too much went on to go into detail on every presentation, but some of the highlights included Jen Titus’ presentation on basic stream assessment, which used “streams in a box” to demonstrate differences between healthy and unhealthy river ecosystems; Montana Tech Professor Pat Munday’s (read Pat's ecorover blog here) thorough overview of the environmental and cultural history of the Upper Clark Fork Basin; and lively panel discussions on outdoor and environmental education and watershed and development issues.

The day’s poetry and prose readings ran the gamut, from Sean Eamon’s visceral and rhythmic takes on life in the shadow of smelting, to Phil Atkins’ quiet meditations on wilderness and civilization, to Dean McElwain’s story of winding through life’s divides and stumbling upon insight in the form of “watershed moments” (hear poems read by Sean and Phil here). Prolific Montana writer and activist George Ochenski also dropped in to recount two snorkeling expeditions on the Clark Fork, first with nature writer David Quammen over twenty years ago, and more recently with CFWEP’s own Matt Vincent. Ochenski painted, with usual humor and wit, a picture of a recovering river that should serve as a reminder that we Montanans can effect our environment in constructive and respectful ways. You can read Ochenski’s own account of his expedition with Matt, originally published in the Missoula Independent, by clicking here.

And if that wasn’t enough, Saturday was also full of watershed films. A local contribution from Butte artist Glenn Bodish, “The Wise River”, gave audiences a new way to look at an unspoiled local river by focusing close-up on the details of the river water itself, its sounds and textures as it interacts with the landscape around it. “The Wise River” has little to do with the science or hydrology of the Wise River, but in other, perhaps more important ways, it paints a more complete picture of the river by letting it simply present itself, rather than boxing it in with quantified chemical data or obtuse formulas for things like the total maximum daily load. Not that water chemistry and TMDL aren’t important, they are, but they don’t tell the whole story of the river.

Neither does the film “The Legendary Mountain” tell the whole story of copper mining in Butte, but, by reading between the frames of this Anaconda Mining Company production from 1974, you can get a sense of it. A classic piece of propaganda, “The Legendary Mountain” glorifies copper mining to almost humorous levels. It does accurately reflect some local history, noting the risks and hazards of underground mining, and documenting the change from underground to open-pit mining in Butte in the 1950s. And it also accurately describes just how important copper was to the industrial revolution, to the development of the modern age, and to 20th century war efforts. What “The Legendary Mountain” doesn’t do is discuss the consequences of all that copper and modernization. The Anaconda Company’s dedication to environmental health and preservation is intoned seriously over footage of glorious snowcapped peaks and pristine lakes that bear no resemblance to and are located nowhere near the company’s mining operations. Of course, the datedness of the piece glosses over some of propagandizing, but perhaps “The Legendary Mountain” is best summarized in a particularly hilarious sequence in which the narrator waxes on about the goodness of the Company and its employees over stock footage of people in offices, ending with a shot of two serious old men in suits entering an elevator while a young woman in more casual attire exits, flashing the two executives a smile. The implicit message, and I’m putting words in the filmmakers mouths here, seems to be: “The Anaconda Company… not only are we awesome at mining, but we also love women!” On the other hand, the film offers some exquisite cinematography, particularly in scenes of the smelting process. Some of the results of smelting might not be much to look at, but the filmmakers here make the smelting process itself look downright sublime.

As I wandered about the old Museum of Fine Arts Butte building near the end of the day, watching the last few artists, scientists, and regular folks processing some of what they had experienced, I was struck by the uniqueness of our situation, environmental and cultural, here in western Montana. How often, particularly in these parts of Big Sky country, can you walk into a historic building in an old mining camp, check out a wide variety of fine art and hear some poetry on the first floor, then take a walk upstairs to listen to a presentation on the science of environmental restoration or take in a film portraying the intricate beauties of the Wise River? This merger of science and education with art and entertainment could be possible only in an environment, physical and historical, as rich as the Clark Fork Basin. And what better location for such an amalgamated event than Butte, the mining city, a patchwork itself of high and low culture, wilderness and industry?

The truest success of Divides & Watersheds can be measured by the diversity of those in attendance, and the depth and richness of their experiences living and working in western Montana as active artists and scientists. The contributors to Divides & Watersheds, in their variety, character, and willingness to share their knowledge and creativity, speak to how deeply dug in is that sense of community here near the top of the continental divide. Tally-up all the paintings, photos, sculptures, films, poems, stories, science, history, and experience on display, all coming from the fine folks in and around the Clark Fork, and you would be hard pressed to find a community with more cultural pay dirt to share.

Former congressman and Butte-native Pat Williams’ keynote speech provided a great capstone to the event. Mr. Williams, in a voice that was warm with a subtle riverly rumble, began as a storyteller, recalling old Butte and comparing the energy and culture of those times with the artwork on display. He segued into a discussion of issues important to his Western Progress organization, focusing particularly on the idea of a restoration economy, challenging the old notion that development and environmental protection are mutually exclusive concepts, and pointing the way toward a future Montana that is dependent on neither natural resource extraction or tourism, but a Montana that takes care of itself and its rich landscape. The speech was received with a standing ovation.

I don’t know that any conclusions can be drawn from the response to Divides & Watersheds, but I don’t think that any need to be. The main goal of the event was to get people talking and thinking about what is going on down around that next bend in the river. That’s the first step. The next is between them and the river.