Brown trout, brown cows, blue soil, clear water

Mount Powell and the upper Clark Fork

The Clark Fork above the Little Blackfoot is running big and clear, and is fishing well.  It looks like it would be a great float and I didn't even see one boat.

I fished  from below the spillway, all the way down to Galen over two days.  The fishing slows down as you go downstream but you won't see another person for miles.  It was too windy to mess with the ponds.

A green Matuka or JJ Special worked great in the mornings and the large browns were pissed and came out of the shadows.  Nymhing worked best in the afternoon.  A firebead Ray Charles with a Little Green Machine or Rainbow Lightning Bug dropper killed it.  There are some huge rainbows which show up on my line up there every so often.  The common belief is that they've flushed over the spillway from the ponds.  I like to think they swam up there from the lower river.

Copper salts percolating out of soil 

Something important for folks to witness is the toxic, metal laden soils which line the banks and floodplain. The majority of the contamination came in 1908 when a 100 year flood turned the entire Clark Fork Valley into a massive toxic mudslide.  The flood waters flushed decades worth of industrial scale mine waste out of Butte and Anaconda and deposited it over 90 miles of floodplain.  A bunch of the sediment from the flood filled in the brand-spanking-new Milltown Reservoir.  The stumps are dead willows which could not grow in the toxic soil.  We call them "ghost willows."

Copper salts up close

Overly friendly brown cows

The view from Lake Berkeley (updated Oct. 2017)

Nestled high up in the Rocky Mountains exists Montana's deepest lake.

The Berkeley Pit

The Berkeley Pit is a 1,780 deep open pit copper mine that is a half mile wide and a mile long.  In 1982, operations at the pit were halted and the giant pumps which kept groundwater out of the pit and old mine shafts under Butte were turned off.  Since that time, the groundwater level below the Butte Hill has been rising back to pre-pumping levels and filled the much of the 10,000+ miles of tunnels below town and also the pit, creating beautiful Lake Berkeley.

Lake Berkeley is not known for its fishing, it's best known as a potential time bomb.  The water in the pit has a PH of about 2.  The acidity of the water causes metals to dissolve and more sulfuric acid to form creating the positive feedback loop otherwise known as acid mine drainage (AMD) or acid rock drainage (ARD).  This does not bode well for most life forms.  I think everyone's heard the story about the snow geese by now (and then it got worse in November 2016).

Water treatment plant

A water treatment plant was built in 2003 to treat the water once it has reached a certain height but that won't go into operation for another 8-10 years. 

Another fun fact about the pit is that the walls sometimes collapse, making mini-tsunamis.  One of the largest landslides beached a research pontoon boat 40 feet above the water surface.

For now, the pit just sits there slowly filling.  MT Resources (the mine next door) used to mine the pit water for copper at a rate of 13 million gallons a day.  They are not currently mining the water anymore.

So, aside from the amazing history of Butte and the awe of human endeavor, why should people be aware of the pit?  Well, the pit and its sister lake, Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond lie at the headwaters of the Clark Fork River.  This is Montana's largest waterway and a major tributary to the Columbia River.  If anything catastrophic were to ever happen, there would be a lot of people and wildlife which would be very seriously affected. 

Another update is that the color of the water turned a beautiful green this spring.  Buttians attributed this to St. Patricks Day.  I've been told it's due to naturally changing chemistry as well as the fact that there is more copper at the surface because Montana Resources stopped mining it. Who knows?

Book tease: Opportunity, Montana - Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape

I am halfway through this great book about the Clark Fork's obliteration due to 100 years of industrial scale mining. Today, I came a cross a great quote that I wanted to share. There are many analogies which seek to make this same point however, this one is my favorite:

"I tend not to trust extremist and ideologues.  It's not about preferring the middle of the road, it's that 'road' is too rigid a metaphor.  On a river, you can't afford to hug strictly the right or left bank and still hope to arrive downstream. You have to follow the current where it leads, left, right, or center.  Sometimes you have to get out and walk."

Eroded banks comprised of toxic mine waste below Warm Springs, MT

Mine waste stream bank