River Wire Blog

Editor's Note: Few anglers know how a handful of dedicated government officials and conservationists saved the incredible tailwaters trout fishery of the Upper Missouri River below Holter Dam. Along the way, they essentially stopped the incredibly destructive practice of stream channelization.

About 20 times each year, I float my drift boat under the bridges of Cascade County and Lewis and Clark County, and I suspect I'm one of the few people who knows their true meaning and reason for existing.

Each time I pass under them I show my age because I see them as memorials to an epic environmental victory, unknown to many, that not only saved one of the best trout fisheries in the world but many other smaller streams.

Once upon a time, back around 1961, the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) was busy building I-15 between Helena and Great Falls and was poised to start work on the Wolf Creek-to-Cascade section, which follows the 35-mile stretch of river that today may be the best trout fishery ever. But not undiscovered.

Biannual surveys rank this stretch of river as among the top three most popular in the state. Over the past 10 years, pressure has ranged from 78,000 to 123,000 angler days per year.

A recent electro-shocking survey found around 4,600 "catchable" (10 inches or longer) trout per mile in sections of this river. Of the 3,458 rainbows per mile, 85 percent were 15 inches or longer and a truly amazing 24 percent were 18 inches or longer,

Add 1,126 brown trout per mile and you have a world-class fly-fishing Mecca — all smooth, fishable water made accessible by a series of outstanding fishing access sites.

And those trout are, according to the biologists, "remarkably high quality," which means a lot of weight per inch. Anybody who fishes this stretch of river knows it and reveres it, but not many know we almost lost it.

Back then, the MDT had just finished cramming the freeway into the narrow, scenic Wolf Canyon, immediately south of the town of Wolf Creek, creating a huge mess along the way. This included extensive damage and straightening of Little Prickly Pear Creek, a great little trout stream and key spawning tributary for the Missouri.

Conservationists and biologists from the Montana Department of Fish and Game, which is what the agency was called in those days (later re-named Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks), had tried in vain to limit damage to the Little Prickly Pear Creek.

After losing that battle, they had to stare at potential catastrophic damage to the mighty Missouri. At that point, this stretch of river might not have been the incredible fishery it is today, but even then, it was among the bluest of Montana's blue-ribbon trout streams.

Believe it or not, the MDT wanted to straighten the section of river straddling the line between Cascade County and Lewis & Clark County and downstream from where the Dearborn River flows into the Missouri, taking out two meanders and the famed Gary Cooper Hole, to avoid building two expensive bridges.

This, to say the least, kicked up quite a controversy. With F&G biologists and information officers leading the charge, traveling the state giving slide shows (remember slide projectors?), and conservation groups like the Montana Wildlife Federation and Montana Trout Unlimited doing the same, they convinced the Montana Legislature to pass landmark legislation called the Montana Stream Protection Act.

The specter of losing this fabulous trout fishery became the focal point of a massive — and successful — lobbying effort. In 1963, the legislature passed the bill temporarily on a close vote. This was a compromise to give the legislation two years of life to see if it worked. The law was so popular and so effective that, voila, two years later lawmakers passed it permanently with only one dissenting vote.

The law required government agencies (federal, state or local) to get a permit before going ahead with construction projects affecting the "bed or banks" of any stream.

At the time Montana was the only state with such a stream preservation law. It not only saved the Missouri, but essentially stopped large-scale stream channelization projects. In 1975, the legislature followed it up by passing the Natural Streambed and Land Conservation Act, a similar but not quite as effective law that required private landowners to get a permit for any stream alteration project on private land.

Most people under 60 aren't familiar with stream channelization because it hardly exists nowadays. In its heyday, it caused the destruction of many fine trout streams.

Straightening even a small section of stream changes the hydraulics of the entire waterway, increasing gradient and speed of the flow and causing the river to try to get back to normal by re-creating lost meanders, often causing damage to trout habitat and agricultural land for many miles both upstream and downstream from the channelized section.

To keep the river at bay and stem the loss of agricultural land, landowners would then often compound the problem by rip-raping stream banks.

The end result? At best, a much inferior fishery.

That didn't happen on famous tailwaters below Holter Dam to Cascade, which has been described as a 35-mile spring creek, but it almost did.

This Act, coupled with public pressure to save the fabulous trout fishery, prompted the MDT to scrap the straightening plan and build two additional, multi-million-dollar freeway bridges.

So, next time you're out there flinging a wooly bugger or paddling a canoe or shooting ducks don't look at the bridges as ugly concrete obtrusions on the scenic landscape. Instead, view them as shrines to a new era of environmental consciousness that saved the Missouri River and many other trout streams.