About 2,000 acres of streambank habitat are preserved within this corridor. Because flooding recurs in the lowlands, and the river depth fluctuates with the regulation of Kerr Dam at the south end of Flathead Lake, the area remains mostly untouched by the rampant agricultural and commercial development occuring elsewhere in the Flathead Valley.
Such sloughs and wetlands provide homes to osprey, upland game birds, great blue herons and double-crested cormorants - as well as a number of threatened and endangered species, including bald eagles, bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. River otters love the protection the vegetative thickets provide.
In the recent past, drainage pipes from the barns actually spewed livestock waste down the bank and into the river - not a pretty sight, or smell, and not a good example to set for the 300 or so Ag Center students.
That's why Constanza von der Pahlen, director of the Flathead Lakers' Critical Lands Project, was out on the riverbank in her old Army clothes Tuesday, shoveling dirt and tacking staples into soil-retention fabric, through which native plants will be seeded and transplanted in coming weeks.
She wasn't alone. Flathead High and Kalispell Junior High School students were out there with her, as well as Kalispell Junior High earth sciences teacher Shirley Harrison. Other manual laborers at Tuesday's dig included representatives of the Ag Center and the Flathead Conservation District and the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Kalispell.
It was Harrison's students about three years ago who brought the problem of the eroding riverbank and livestock waste drainage to the attention of the state and federal agencies.
The problem was obvious, but the solution was not, Harrison said during an interview Tuesday. She set her students to work on the problem during the 2002-03 school year.
“I asked the question, how do we keep the stream bank from collapsing?” she said.
Riprap was the obvious answer. Riprap, a general term for erosion control, has been used along freeways and highways for a century or more to stabilize recalcitrant streams.
But the students noticed the lush jungle of vegetation across the river, and downstream from the pasture, an area fondly called Goose Alley by locals. They liked the idea of native plants on those riverbanks rather than a rock pile keeping the water inbounds.
“We did a lot of work on stream dynamics,” Harrison said.
Riprap changes stream dynamics both above and below it - not very neighborly, and an action that could shift the erosion problem elsewhere.
After considerable research, the students suggested a two-pronged solution, balancing the interests and needs of the school district's Ag Center with that of water quality and wildlife habitat in the wetlands.
Several presentations later, the students had created what is now officially know as VoAg School-Stillwater River Restoration Project. It has received some $49,000 in grants from federal and nonprofit agencies, and work on the project is now under way, with completion scheduled early this summer.
The Flathead Lakers, a private nonprofit water quality group based in Polson, secured $10,000 in grants, and the NRCS funded the rest.
But before the money flowed to the riverbank restoration, students were grilled at the site by a federal official responsible for funding U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Habitat Improvement Program for Kids.
“They had to prove to professionals why the project would work,” Harrison said.
Subsequent classes of students have each had a hand in the project during the ensuing years, she said, and have ongoing research projects in the neighboring wetlands and sloughs.
A professional from the National Park Service agreed to do the final design drawings because of the advanced engineering expertise required, and a Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes expert offered advice on plant selection. Also, county officials agreed to cede 5 acres to Kalispell Public Schools so the pig and cattle barns could be torn down and relocated nearby, in a more appropriate setting. The school agreed to give up a significant stretch of cow pasture so the stream bank could be gently graded back and terraced toward the river - a sacrifice that might not have been necessary had riprap been installed.
But the students' basic idea remained: stabilize the riverbank by grading it gradually toward the oxbow in the river, instead of using riprap, then restore the riverbank with native vegetation.
The vegetation is key to a healthy restoration project, von der Pahlen said. Trees and plants form a buffer strip on the stream bank and slow down runoff. The plants' roots filter out pollutants before they can be carried into the water and downstream into the lake.
“From the Flathead Lakers' perspective, we would like to restore the native plants and trees that help protect the water quality through that filtering function,” she said.
With that, she climbed down onto a coconut mat and began pounding 8-inch staples into the fabric with a framing hammer, to keep the mat in place to protect the native plants as they begin to grow in coming weeks.
Reporter John Stromnes can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at jstromnes@missoulian.com.
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