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WEST GLACIER - Glacier Park officials want to know whether the public thinks it's a good idea to build a barrier to turn back foreign invaders near the Canadian border.

The barrier, designed to block invasive lake trout, is intended to keep the non-natives from overwhelming bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout in the Quartz Creek drainage.

According to Deputy Park Superintendent Jerry O'Neal, Quartz Creek is the last drainage in the park that remains free of non-native fish.

The barrier, he said, "would provide substantial protection to one of the last remaining enclaves of bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout in a northern Rocky Mountain headwater drainage."

His office is accepting comments on the proposal through June 9.

The $20,000 barrier would be paid for in part by the Glacier Fund, a nonprofit raising money for park projects that might otherwise fall through the cracks.

Fisheries biologists say blocking non-natives is especially important in a place such as Quartz Lake, which is among the last lakes in the Columbia River Basin that still have a full complement of native fish and remain untainted by non-natives.

Work by fisheries biologists in adjacent Glacier Park drainages has shown a near complete replacement of bull trout by invasive lake trout in the past three decades. Those scientists have long advocated a barrier between Lower and Middle Quartz lakes to stem the spread of lake trout.

Since Glacier National Park was designated a national park in 1910, native fish populations have been dwindling in the face of non-native species. In the early years, most of these impacts resulted from a policy of directly stocking non-native fish.

"As a result," O'Neal said, "native fish began breeding with non-native fish; i.e. native westslope cutthroat trout bred with non-native Yellowstone cutthroat or rainbow trout. In more recent decades, the major impact on native fish has been from the invasion of non-native species through the Flathead River system into the lakes and streams of Glacier."

The non-natives out-compete the natives when it comes to both feeding and breeding, and interbreeding pollutes the native gene pool.

O'Neal said park scientists are especially concerned about bull trout - which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act - and westslope cutthroats - listed as a "species of special concern" in Montana.

Comments on the barrier proposal may be e-mailed to: glac_public_comments@nps.gov, or can be sent to Glacier National Park, Attention: Quartz Creek Fish Barrier EA, West Glacier, MT 59936.

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