Gurgling up from the woodlands near here, the creek runs through the ranches and farmland of the Blackfoot Valley.
Once pristine, the creek has become a trampled mess in modern times, its waters muddied by cattle, depleted by irrigation and overheated by a loss of shade trees.
“It's open heart surgery,” said Ron Pierce, a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries biologist in the Blackfoot watershed. “This patient is really on its last legs. We're basically starting over to reconstruct the creek's natural geometry and sinuosity and depths.”
The project is the latest effort by the Future Fisheries Improvement Program, a statewide partnership of government agencies, landowners, nonprofit groups and private foundations.
The program includes fencing livestock out of streams, planting riparian vegetation, reconstructing stream channels and increasing in-stream flows by helping irrigators to use their water more efficiently.
Also, the program installs screens to keep fish out of irrigation canals, constructs fish ladders, replaces undersized culverts that prevent fish passage, and works to prevent hybridization of non-native and native trout.
The Future Fisheries program, which allocates $745,000 annually in state funds to restore wild and native fish habitats across Montana, started in 1996 and is administered by FWP. It was preceded by the River Restoration program, a similar statewide initiative.
The two programs have restored many miles of the Blackfoot River and its tributaries, boosting habitat for imperiled bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout, while helping to maintain the valley's agricultural way of life.
The Lincoln Spring Creek project “is just one of many we've done over the past 20 years,” Pierce said. “In many cases, we're reconstructing these streams from scratch.”
Since Future Fisheries was created a dozen years ago, the FWP Commission has allocated $9.4 million to the projects statewide and attracted $23.4 million more in matching federal and private funds.
Across Montana, 350 projects have been completed, resulting in the restoration of 140 miles of streams. Another 77 projects are under way or pending.
“A lot of this work wouldn't get done without the Future Fisheries program,” said Glenn Phillips, FWP fisheries habitat bureau chief.
Most funds for Future Fisheries come from fishing license fees and the state's Resource Indemnity Trust, which is coal trust fund money earmarked for native trout enhancement projects.
Additional funding comes from private landowners, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited, the federal State Wildlife Grant program and private foundations.
“The key to our program is developing partnerships,” said Mark Lere, who manages the Future Fisheries program. “Future Fisheries offers landowners and others the opportunity to participate in projects to restore Montana's wild and native fisheries and, at the same time, enhance the social, economic and conservation benefits for the entire watershed community.”
Many of the projects have been in western Montana.
In the Bitterroot Valley, two large pipe siphons were recently installed underneath Skalkaho Creek to prevent spawning trout and their progeny from being trapped in irrigation ditches.
In southwest Montana, 11 projects have been approved on the Big Hole and Ruby rivers, where biologists are restoring a protected Arctic grayling population. Seven of the projects have been completed. Three more are under way. Two more are slated to begin soon.
The Blackfoot River and many of its tributaries have become a nationwide model for stream restoration after suffering for decades from mining pollution, livestock degradation, dewatering for irrigation and other problems.
The Blackfoot watershed has about 1,900 miles of streams where native trout can live. More than 150 of those streams have been evaluated, most of which are impaired.
Surveys show westslope cutthroat and other native trout populations have increased from nothing to more than 15 fish per 100 feet of stream in many restored creeks.
“The Blackfoot has been a cornerstone of the Future Fisheries program,” Pierce said.
Future Fisheries is among other partnership programs in the Blackfoot watershed whose work includes securing conservation easements that protect the land, water, wildlife and fish habitat.
The public funds help private landowners to be better caretakers of the streams that cross their properties, keeping sediment out of the water and leaving more water in the streams to benefit migratory fish upstream and downstream, officials said.
The Lincoln Spring Creek project, which cost $180,000, started in early April and should be complete by early May on the Grosfield Ranch.
The ranch's cattle, hay farming and irrigation have caused about 1 1/2 miles of the creek to become widened, shallow, straightened and filled with sediment.
“It's very typical of many of the spring creeks we've worked on,” said Ryen Aasheim, a project coordinator with Trout Unlimited's Blackfoot chapter.
The project includes narrowing the creek, restoring its meandering course, deepening pools, adding logs and rocks, replacing undersized culverts and planting riparian vegetation.
Also, fencing will be built to keep cattle out of the stream, which flows about seven months a year, and a drinking water tank will be added nearby for the cows. Grosfield is helping with the restoration, including providing logs, sod and manpower.
“Cattle and fish and healthy streams can co-exist,” Aasheim said.
Restoring a creek is messy business, doing in a month with excavators what it took nature centuries to do with the force of water.
But midway through the project, the little stream's riffles, runs, pools, glides, twists and turns were rapidly returning to their original state.
The stream's flows also were rising within their narrowed confines - they'll jump from one cubic foot per second to 40 cubic feet per second in some sections when the work is complete.
“If people aren't used to seeing this work, it's kind of shocking - turning a stream into a construction site - but they've been so degraded that they're not functioning normally by any measure,” Pierce said. “It'll be a whole new stream when we're done.”
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