Locator map of the Clark Fork river — in Montana and Idaho. Credits I, Pfly, created it based on USGS and Digital Chart of the World data – CC BY-SA 3.0

The Clark Fork River is federally-designated “critical habitat” for bull trout, a “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act since 1999. The Upper Clark Fork is also part of the nation’s largest Superfund site, having suffered severe pollution from flushing a century of toxic mining and smelting waste downstream.

The Federal District Court yesterday ordered the Department of Interior and the West Side Ditch Co. to immediately stop diverting  the  Upper Clark Fork’s scarce water into the West Side Ditch Company’s irrigation ditch. The Grant-Kohrs Ranch, which is owned by the National Park Service and operated as a ‘cultural display’ of a working ranch from the late 19th century, is a shareholder in the West Side Ditch.

The ranch irrigates 413 acres and has water rights for more than 500 acre-feet. An acre foot is the amount of water necessary to cover one acre a foot deep. The result is that every acre on the ranch can get more than a foot of water simply to grow hay while the Clark Fork River goes dry and bull trout face extinction just so tourists can see an inauthentic display of how cattle were raised in the late 1800s, since the ranch uses modern machinery and electric pumps.

In most years, the West Side Ditch takes 50% or more of the Upper Clark Fork flow in mid-to-late summer. In drought years, as in this summer, the diversion has been taking an even greater share of the river’s flow. There is simply not enough water left in the Upper Clark Fork River after this diversion. The extent of dewatering has altered bull trout critical habitat so adversely that the species can no longer survive in that portion of the Upper Clark Fork, much less migrate to headwaters streams to spawn.

Because bull trout are ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act, it is illegal to kill them—and any activities that ‘harm or harass’ listed species require an ‘incidental take’ permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We sued the Department of Interior three years ago, in May 2002, over some of the same issues but agreed to drop our lawsuit after the government promised to fund improvements on the West Side Ditch diversion and fund fish screens to keep fish out of the irrigation ditch but that hasn’t happened.

Of course the Alliance for the Wild Rockies supports preserving Montana’s historic places, but it’s fair to say the bull trout, which have inhabited the Clark Fork River since the last ice age, have occupied a much longer part of Montana’s history than the ranch, and they shouldn’t be driven to extinction for an inauthentic cultural display.

We have millions of cattle and thousands of hay fields in Montana but there are very few bull trout left, especially in their historic spawning areas of the Upper Clark Fork River.  Considering the Clark Fork River was a healthy river full of bull trout when the original Grant-Kohrs Ranch was founded in 1862, the question is whether the Park Service should destroy bull trout critical habitat for an iinauthentic historic ranch display when simply growing less hay can help return the Clark Fork to a living river where bull trout can once again survive, spawn, and avoid extinction.

This case is not over. If you agree with us please consider helping the Alliance winour case and also please consider donating to Counterpunch for keeping the public informed about what our government is doing.

The post Federal Court Grants Alliance for the Wild Rockies a Temporary Restraining Order Stopping West Side Ditch Co. from Dewatering Bull Trout Critical Habitat in the Clark Fork River appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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