Editor's Note: Second in a three-part series

DEER LODGE - Growing up downstream of the Warm Springs tailings ponds, rancher Evan Johnson recalled some of the stranger gifts of the Clark Fork River.

The legacy of copper mining has grown alongside the 800-acre Johnson ranch since Evan's great-grandfather started it 101 years ago. That was the year of the largest flood on record in the Clark Fork drainage, a catastrophe that left millions of tons of mine and smelter wastes along the river's banks. Slickens of bluish, heavy-metal-laced sediment scabbed the river oxbows. Nothing has grown on them for a century.

"You could take a pocketknife and run it in the slicken," Johnson said, "and it would copper your blade."

That's about to change.

The 120-mile stretch of the Clark Fork between its headwaters and Milltown is undergoing a

$123 million remediation and restoration effort. It's part of a larger project stretching from Butte and Anaconda to Missoula - the entire length of the Upper Clark Fork River. In geographic scope, it's the largest federal Superfund cleanup project in the United States.

Most of the river work will take place in the Deer Lodge Valley above and below Johnson's ranch. Some 80 private landowners control most of what the Environmental Protection Agency calls "Reach A" - the upper 43 miles of the Clark Fork.

The EPA will supervise the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the state Natural Resource Damage Program in neutralizing the toxic sediments and restoring natural vegetation to the river corridor.

The original engineers of the Upper Clark Fork were beavers. Their dams were built throughout the Deer Lodge floodplain until the animals were trapped out sometime in the mid-1800s. But their dams remained.

Prospectors started panning for gold in 1864. Their efforts soon became industrialized, and by 1885, the cities of Butte and Anaconda were sprawling mining and smelting operations. Most of Butte's mine waste got poured into Silver Bow Creek. Anaconda's smelter dumped its poisons into Warm Springs Creek. Together, those streams form the headwaters of the Clark Fork River.

The 1908 flood washed millions of cubic yards of mining and smelting waste into the river. The tailings collected in the backwaters created by the old beaver dams, leaving deposits several feet thick.

From the start of the mining era through the 1950s, no trout lived in the Upper Clark Fork. The river's health began to improve with the construction of three sedimentation ponds at Warm Springs: in 1911, 1916 and 1959. Those ponds captured most new mine and smelter waste, but did nothing for the deposits already left along 43 miles of river between Galen and Drummond.

Interstate 90 motorists drive by the settling ponds without noticing when they pass Warm Springs. The rebuilt version of Silver Bow Creek runs between the freeway and a high berm hiding nearly four miles of contaminated water.

As the Clark Fork winds into Deer Lodge, a new kind of problem appears. The town's Eastside Road runs past the former Montana State Prison farmlands, which flood-irrigated its crops.

"When the river ran red in the '30s, they didn't shut the headgates off," Powell County Commissioner Cele Pohle said. "All of that whole area was contaminated."

A railroad trestle bridge in the middle of town has been a popular swimming area for decades. It's also a huge deposit of toxic material. This summer, DEQ analysts took samples to plot where their cleanup efforts must concentrate. Remediation and restoration work should start next year.

"We've been hearing a lot of, 'When are you going to do it?' " said Joel Chavez, DEQ's project officer for the Upper Clark Fork. "After almost 25 years, the public has a genuine expectation of seeing some action. We'll be inviting the public out in the next few weeks to see the testing activity we have going, so they'll feel more comfortable and familiar with our activities."

In 2001, the EPA estimated 900 acres of the Deer Lodge floodplain contained about

8.7 million cubic yards of toxic material. That's four times the amount removed from Milltown Reservoir above Missoula after it was drained in 2008.

The repair plan calls for digging out the worst and most accessible slickens and quarantining their toxins in the same pits used for Milltown's sediments. Other dead zones will be plowed up and treated with lime and other chemicals to neutralize the poisonous metals. That's known as the remediation phase.

The second phase - restoration - involves replanting willow trees and other vegetation to stabilize the riverbanks. Affected areas will see 50-foot-wide strips of shoreline covered with new plant life. The 12-year effort will radically change the landscape of the Deer Lodge Valley.

"At first, there were landowners that didn't necessarily agree with it (the cleanup project)," said Doug Martin, who heads the NRDP restoration effort. "Most of the landowners now, they've basically seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Some farmers there have a lot of impacted property that they own, pay taxes on, try to raise cattle on. They're figuring: 'I haven't got a lick of productivity off of this - why would I stop EPA from cleaning it up?' "

For many Powell County property owners, the reason is weeds.

"They're dealing with an awful lot of landowners who are not real enthused about the process," said Powell County Superintendent of Schools Jules Waber, who's been monitoring the Clark Fork restoration efforts since 1995. Digging out the slickens and replacing them with buffer zones of new trees and plants could cause more problems than it solves, he said.

"I've got a lot of riparian fencing on my place, and where there's no access to grazing I've got leafy spurge," Waber said. "I never had that before."

Treating contaminated areas in place with lime would be better, he said. That would neutralize the acidic waste, not introduce new weed seeds, and retain soils that were adapted to river conditions. New fill soil was more likely to wash away in a flood, he said, undoing all the restoration work.

"We've got to get a handle on the weed problem," agreed Kris Edwards, EPA's remedial project manager for the Upper Clark Fork. Repair work must remove the contaminants, not add weeds, and be able to withstand 10-year flood events. Coming up with a plan that meets all three goals has been tough.

"Cost control is another challenge," Edwards said. "Construction prices are costing double what they would have cost five years ago."

There's about $123 million available to do the next 10 years' worth of remediation and restoration. But even that can't buy a vision of how the Deer Lodge Valley will evolve. Will it become the next hot fishing spot? Will ranchers start subdividing their riverfronts for summer homes? Will business (or the lack thereof) return to normal in this drive-by stretch of Montana?

"We haven't worked with the city to say, 'What do we want to do now?' " Pohle said of her counterparts in Deer Lodge. "Our heads are barely above water anyway. We are a poor county. You'd assume with the prison here, we'd have people living in town. But only one-third of the staff lives here. You see them buying a six-pack of soda on their way back home to Anaconda."

Pohle had similar doubts about the impact of the "restoration economy." While a lot of people are expected to be hired for excavation and remediation work along the Clark Fork, she doubted many would be Deer Lodge residents. Her hopes were pinned on seeing some county roads and bridges getting upgrades rather than hearing louder cash registers in the town's restaurants and hotels.

The Clark Fork River itself may bring that change about. The ultimate reason for all this work is to revive a nearly dead waterway. Healthy rivers have been very good to places like Hamilton, Bozeman and Livingston.

"We always had the hope when they finally did clean up the river, the fisheries would come back," Pohle said. "After 20 years, we welcome the whole process. We want to finally put this to rest."

Related

• Restoration river: Work to begin soon on cleaning Upper Clark Fork
• Restoration river: Unlocking Upper Clark Fork's potential for recreation, wildlife