Just got back from another reporting trip to Anaconda, Montana, and took some fresh pics of remediation work in the Opportunity area on the way. Above is Silver Bow Creek, the main tributary of the Clark Fork, post-recent remediation work of the last few weeks. This is the spot where I started my canoe trip last year, looking upstream from the Montana Scenic Highway 1 bridge. What you’re seeing is a pretty extensive section of floodplain that’s been scraped of contaminated surface soils, recontoured with donor and amended soils, and a streambed that’s been reshaped with mat (the light brown at water’s edge) and reinforced around the bridge with stone rubble. This will all presumably be planted come spring, and in a couple of years, with a little luck, the unsuspecting eye might not be able to tell the creek was ever anything but natural.

Just for reference, here the same view last month:

Below is a shot looking back toward Interstate 90, across remaining slicken areas (note the dead willows and sickly soil), at some of the earthmoving equipment that’s doing the work.

Here’s a view of what a small section of soil-scraped landscape looks like. The contaminated soils are scraped to depth, piled up, and then loaded into trucks for transit to the nearby Opportunity Ponds, aka BP/ARCO Waste Repository. The soil is replaced and replanted.

Here’s another view of stacked soils awaiting transport to the Opportunity Ponds site, on the other side of Opportunity, shown here in the middle ground.

And finally this. This is Silver Bow Creek, looking upstream from the Stewart Street crossing in Opportunity. The other end of the pipe is sucking water out of a wetland area, presumably to dry it out in preparation for soil removal. In other words, the water is coming straight out of a network of metals-contaminated puddles and pumping directly into Silver Bow, which feeds into the Warm Springs Ponds.  Who knows what it’s carrying with it, but wetland remediation is an imprecise science, and rebuilding river is messy business — some amount of bad stuff inevitably ends up downstream.

I wrote here (and posted pics) a bit earlier about my October canoe trip down Texas’ Devils River. Today I got a copy of the winter issue of The Drake with my article and photos of that trip in it. It’s my first piece for them, and my first for a magazine that’s specifically about a thing that I don’t do (fly-fish). Worked out pretty well, I think.

You can check out page-by-page pdfs of the piece here, or better yet, go online and subscribe.

Some pics from last week’s reporting trip to the Deer Lodge valley, taken mostly in and around Opportunity, Montana, with a few from closer to Anaconda and Flint Creek. The waterway that’s being torn up is Silver Bow Creek, the headwater of the Clark Fork River.

an eddy scouring a circle in the ice just below the old Stimson mill site during an early freeze a couple of weeks ago

dead tree silhouetted against the sunset near the confluence

So I was a little surprised the other day to walk back there again and see this:

This is a state Department of Environmental Quality project, paid for by the Stimson Lumber Company and subcontracted to Missoula’s EnviroCon remediation contractors, to remove the defunct Stimson Mill’s old cooling ponds. The horizontal berm in the foreground is the foundational remains of the old Bonner dam, behind which was a small pond, segmented into several cells, one of which was used to let heated water from the mill cool before being released back into the main stream. The beds of those former ponds are full of concrete and logs and rip-rap and a century’s worth of refuse. As part of the ongoing cleanup of the confluence area, they’re being removed down to original riverbed alluvium. You can see the two Cats in the river, feeding diggings to a constant stream of dumptrucks driving up and down the riverbed to haul the stuff away.

The project may go on for up to two weeks, I was told. When I asked about the plumes of mud streaming downriver from the work, since there’s no apparent sediment mitigation in place, I was told that the work is being performed under a “temporary turbidity exemption,” and no particular impact to the fishery is expected because a) nothing’s spawning this time of year, b) the disturbance is expected to be brief, and c) it’s less than a mile before the downstreaming muck will get diluted by the influx of water from the Clark Fork.

I guess so. Still, a pretty striking thing to see, and there’ll be much more before the confluence is open to floaters, since three concrete bridge abutments just upstream are coming out next summer, and the crib foundation of the old Bonner dam still has to be removed at some TBA date.

Anyhow, Michelle’s examples include pieces written by John McPhee, Edwin Dobb, Ian Frazier, and, umm, flatteringly, me.

Read Michelle’s piece here.

The other day I drove up to Warm Springs Ponds, the mine waste settling pond/wildlife management area jointly managed by Montana’s Fish & Wildlife department and BP-ARCO. I was hoping to get a bit more paddling in before winter settles prohibitively in, and I haven’t paddled the ponds yet. Not that there was likely to be much excitement in canoeing that shallow stillwater, where no shore is much farther than hollering distance from any other. Mostly I just wanted to get a better firsthand sense of how the cellular pond complex is pieced together. That, at least generally, I was able to get out of a walk, which is all I was able to get out the day. The ponds, it turned out when I got there, are already freezing over. Really interesting light out there, though.

Probably the most curious thing about the ponds, or at least the one I wasn’t expecting, is the presence of the prison-built Morel Rainbow Arch Bridge (pictured) to nowhere, stranded on little clot of terrain out in the middle of one Pond 2 (there are three ponds in the complex, two functional in the current water-treatment regimen, one retired). The little bridge was built in 1914 to span Silver Bow Creek—the mine-waste conduit coming out of Butte that is the effective headwater of the Clark Fork—and abandoned two years later in one of many pond expansion over the years. It’s still sitting there right where it was built, spanning nothing now, but marking the spot in the 2,400-acre puddle where there was once a live stream.

Devils River, Texas, October 2011. My first paying job to combine paddling, picture-taking, and writing. More like this, please.

Here’s a slideshow of what I saw.

UPDATE: Regarding the recent High Country News essay referenced in the below post: You can now see the whole story in pdf form without the trial subscription, using the link above. I’d love to have any feedback. Thanks.