An obscure stream no wider than a sidewalk, the creek has nonetheless become a new frontier in the West's effort to reverse more than a century of mining damage to the region's waterways.
At the bottom of the narrow canyon, a dead zone once denuded by gold miners was a cool, green oasis again, where cobbles and logs filled the water, conifers sprouted and moose browsed.
In the bucket were 20 young westslope cutthroat trout and one bull trout, both important native species whose numbers are increasing in this tributary of the middle Clark Fork River.
“It's a good sign,” said Roberts, Trout Unlimited's Western mine restoration coordinator. “We're trying to restore the ecosystem by doing the minimal of what's needed to get it functioning naturally again.”
Hidden in the Lolo National Forest, Eustache Creek has taken on outsized importance in the West's effort to repair thousands of streams damaged by placer mining over the past century.
Across the West, most money for mine reclamation goes toward water quality and toxicity pollution, leaving little for the biological and engineering tasks of making mining-damaged streams look and function as they once did.
For years, Trout Unlimited has had a program for restoring Eastern streams damaged by hardrock mining, but no similar program existed for dredge mining in the West until 2004 when the group created its abandoned mine reclamation program.
Trout Unlimited teamed up with the U.S. Forest Service to look for new and affordable ways to restore streams that had been poisoned, straightened and muddied by mining and the tons of tailings piles left behind in the headwaters of the Ninemile Valley.
After several years of planning, Eustache Creek has proved a $150,000 success that used public and private funds and staff and volunteer labor to become a model for restoring other streams across the West, project officials said.
The project, which recently received the 2008 Riparian Challenge Award from the Western Division of American Fisheries Society, has prompted five more restoration projects that are in various stages of planning in the Ninemile district.
Using the Ninemile project as a blueprint, Trout Unlimited and the Forest Service also are collaborating to restore streams in Idaho and Colorado.
Karen Knudsen, executive director of the Clark Fork Coalition, said the Ninemile stream restoration projects are helping to clean up the Clark Fork watershed.
“This kind of on-the-ground care for our backyard streams is what makes all the difference for protecting our watershed,” she said. “So many creeks and streams aren't in the public spotlight but really need some help.”
A number of government agencies, including the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, and nonprofit groups are working to restore Western streams damaged by mining.
But Scott Spaulding, the Ninemile Ranger District fisheries biologist, said the extent of collaboration between the Trout Unlimited and the Forest Service is unusual.
The project includes community volunteers, histories of all mining activity and ownership in the Ninemile drainage, and aerial Global Positioning System mapping of the entire watershed, creating a digital topographic map that pinpoints even the smallest piles of mine tailings.
“We're going beyond what's expected,” Spaulding said. “The traditional criticism of this kind of project is that we're spending all this money and don't know if it's working. Well, we're showing that it works.”
The partnership is focusing on large-scale restoration plans for headwaters at higher elevations, where placer mining on public lands created swaths of industrial waste across the forest.
Two years ago, a 1.3-mile stretch of Eustache Creek was dried up and buried under huge piles of dredged rocks and dirt that miners pushed aside decades ago. Some of the waste piles are so sterilized by mining toxins that they remain denuded lumps on the landscape.
Eustache Creek workers used an excavator to remove or spread out tons of tailings and to restore the creek's natural channel through the narrow canyon.
Logs - real or made of coconut fibers - and other woody debris were added to stabilize the banks and provide shade and cover. Seven thousand native trees were planted along with many shrubs and grasses.
Also, a structure new to the world of stream restoration called a groundwater retention sill was used in the dewatered section. It is an underground sheet of impermeable fabric that forces the stream to rise through the cobbles and return to its natural run on the surface.
As part of the project's post-monitoring, workers are surveying streamflows, fish and macroinvertebrate populations, vegetation, pebble counts, water quality, water temperature and other factors.
Other stream restoration projects are in various stages of planning in the Ninemile.
On St. Louis Creek, copper, arsenic and sediment are leaching into the water from a large open pit and overburden about 20 miles up the Ninemile Creek drainage.
Bond monies left by the mining companies were not enough for full reclamation.
Restoration of a half-mile of St. Louis Creek is expected to cost $500,000 between 2009 and 2010.
On the Mattie V Creek, a century of prospecting and placer mining have heavily altered the waterway, especially in the lower reaches near its confluence with Ninemile Creek.
The restoration project will restore a half-mile of the creek and cost an estimated $180,000 from 2010 to 2011.
Reporter John Cramer can be reached at 523-5259 or at johncramer@missoulian.com.
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