News

Tell us your clean water story

by Bill Pfeiffer

On June 30 we urged folks to send us their Clean Water Stories.  Below is one of those great submissions!  We urge you to keep those stories coming in.  We’ll send you some sweet MTU gear in exchange.  Submit your stories and photos to [email protected] we’d also love to see your photos on Instagram #30daysforcleanwater.  For more information on our plea for stories read our executive director, David Brooks, post on the the importance of headwater streams.

The Pursuit of Happiness By Joshua Bergan

Headwaters are important. To me, to generations before and after me, and to the fish and wildlife that live on the vital sustenance that headwaters provide.

Recently, my wife and I have spent most of our summer free-time hiking up to and fishing Montana’s mountain lakes, many of which are the headwaters for streams that feed the large rivers. These lakes have become a part of us. I thought that once our project was complete, we’d be happy to get back to floating and fishing big rivers, but that’s not the case. We cannot wait to spend more time at these headwaters.

These pristine mountain lakes are spectacular. They often sport clear teal water that you can see 20-feet into and host native cutthroat trout and arctic grayling – the same species that Silas Goodrich caught on the Corps of Discovery, and that sustained people for hundreds of years before that. These fish have only a small fraction of their original places left, where anglers like my wife and I can find them. Clean , healthy headwaters are important to us.

Aside from the well-documented significance these sanctuaries provide for native plants and animals, they provide people like us with a refuge, a reason to get exercise and get healthy, some peace, memories, photo-ops and ultimately, the pursuit of happiness.

It’s true that there is some economic opportunity up there. We need the minerals and metals that are buried near these important waterways and we all need to make a living. We need to balance these things with peoples’ right to recreation, low-impact economic opportunity, and the plants and animals that rely on these places that have the same right to exist as humans do. It is my strongly held belief that we do not need those minerals, metals, and monies enough that it’s worth destroying these headwaters.

Headwaters are too important to us all to allow protections to lapse.

News

30 Days for Clean Water – We need your help!

by Bill Pfeiffer

You have 30 days to tell the EPA to protect Clean Water

The public can now comment on a decision by the Trump administration to repeal a rule that would protect 60 percent of stream miles in American.  In June, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would begin the process of repealing the 2015 Clean Water Rule that protects headwater streams and water sources, however, the opening of the 30-day comment period was delayed until today.  As anglers, conservationists, irrigators, recreationalists, and, well, water drinkers, we need to defend the Clean Water Rule against repeal because it:

  • Protects from pollution the cold, clean headwaters the account for roughly 50 percent of Montana’s trout streams.
  • Includes exemptions to ensure that farmers and ranchers are not penalized for the water use that keeps them in business.
  • Safeguards the drinking water sources of one in three Americans.
  • Underpins the $7.1 billion outdoor recreation economy in Montana that generates 71,000 jobs and $286 million in state and local taxes.  Ten million people visit Montana every year, in large degree, because of the state’s unparalleled natural amenities, especially cold, clean trout streams. 

Without the Clean Water Rule everyone who cares and consumes clean water loses, except the industries that its repeal will allow to pollute our headwaters without regulation or penalty.  We’ve had enough of that in Montana!

Act now by providing a written, online comment to the EPA before August 28th. Submit comments to  https://www.regulations.gov/.  

Or for more information, check out the EPA’s page on this issue,  

https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA_FRDOC_0001-21030

Please consider copying the comments you send to the EPA to all of your Congressional delegates.  Let them know that you expect them to defend clean water rule-making in Congress.

Senator Steve Daines: (202) 224-2651 (Washington, DC office); or email

Senator Jon Tester: (202) 224-2644 (Washington, DC office); or email

Representative Greg Gianforte: (202) 225-3211 (Washington, DC office); or email
News

MTU Tip of the Hat – Let’s out do 2016 on July 22, 2017

by Bill Pfeiffer

In 2016 generous Montana Guides and Outfitters (40 of them!) pulled together and donated their tips for one day, and raised more than $3,500 for conservation IN MONTANA. Let’s break last year’s record and raise even more for conservation projects on the rivers we love to fish. Nobody knows the rivers like the conservation-minded guides and outfitters on them everyday.

Participation is SUPER easy. Let Kelley @ MTU know via a quick email ([email protected]), text: 608.225.2779, or voicemail: 406.543.0054. We’ll mail you a pre-paid, addressed envelope to send in with your tips. We’ll feature you on MTU’s website, and send your name to our 4,500 members in Montana.

 

 

News

Clean Water Rule rollback – Your Story is Needed

by Bill Pfeiffer

Montana Trout Unlimited has an assignment for you. Go spend time on your nearest or dearest headwater stream in Montana. Take photographs (selfies are OK). Reflect on why that place is important to you, your family, and your friends, including those with fins, fur, or wings. Maybe you have clamored along Hidden Gem Creek to where it bubbles up through alluvium and begins flowing under deep shade and over moss-draped stones every year on your birthday just to be sure it, and you, are still fully alive. Maybe you’ve taken up the Tenkara rod and savor angling by stealth and simplicity.   We need your photos and stories to help save the headwaters you value.

Whatever your story, wherever your special small water, we want to hear about it. Feel free to let your secret spots remain so by giving them nicknames. But know that disguising their names makes them no less vulnerable to Trump administration rollbacks in regulations that protect clean water and healthy habitat.

In his first 100 days POTUS Donald Trump signed an Executive Order asking the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to consider revoking the Clean Water Rule (CWR). The rule is meant to extend Clean Water Act protection to “ephemeral” or “intermittent” streams and many wetlands, which, in ontological terms, are the birthplaces and infants of our coldwater trout waters in Montana and, truthfully, all fisheries. Statistically speaking, the rule, when implemented, will apply to 60 percent of the stream mileage in the U.S. and roughly 20 million acres of wetlands. After years of Congressional and court haggling over whether or not to protect the precious beginnings of America’s water resources from pollution and dismemberment by granting them the same clean water standards set for larger, navigable waters, the Clean Water Rule was finalized in 2015. Eighty-seven percent of the one million public comments on the rule supported it and 83% of hunters and anglers strongly favor its application to small streams and wetlands.

Passage of CWR is a vital safeguard for all water users. By protecting the source from poisoning and physical destruction, it helps ensure clean drinking, irrigation, stock, and trout waters. While doing so, the rule also includes exceptions so that private landowners can continue to operate ditches, canals, ponds, irrigation systems, and the like for personal or commercial benefit as they have historically, without new water quality regulations. Nonetheless, the Trump administration is pushing to abort the rule and unshackle industry from having to help keep our water clean. Since we care about the health of the water that flows from our taps, grows our crops, slakes our livestock, and is home to our state and national fisheries, we cannot let this happen.

Montana can provide more gorgeous backdrops, and trout-filled snapshots than in any other state. Our personal stories of real places can illustrate that the threat is not abstract, but is real to people, places, professions and wildlife we love. Last week, I toured a $40 million mine restoration site on the headwaters of Montana’s famed Blackfoot River. A decades-long, state-led project to clean up and restore Mike Horse and Bear Trap Creeks has been a key reason that the Blackfoot has bounced back from a century of industrial logging and mining. Today anglers travel from around the globe for a chance at catching native and wild trout on the Blackfoot. Yet, small-scale silver mining continues on “intermittent” stretches of tributaries above the current Mike Horse cleanup site. If the Clean Water Rule disappears, those mine operators will no longer be obligated to care about sending new waves of heavy metals downstream through the meandering creeks that $40 million has brought back to life.

We will use our portfolio of your stories and photos to inspire other states to document their headwaters and to illustrate for the public and politicians what is at stake. If you need another push to get out the door, check out TU President Chris Wood’s tale of raising his kids on the Little Cacapon River in West Virginia, an intermittent stream covered by the CWR. (http://www.tu.org/blog-posts/little-kids-and-small-streams-deserve-the-clean-water-act) So get out there! Please send your stories and photos to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.

-from Montana Trout Unlimited’s Spring 2017 Trout Line by David Brooks, executive director

News

Staying Connected with MTU

by Bill Pfeiffer

It’s a digital age. Most of us are connected to the outside world through some form of electronic media whether its email newsletters or social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Montana TU has traditionally relied on print media to communicate with our membership. However, electronic media can be a valuable tool for communicating with membership and the public in general. A recent Missoulian article emphasizes the failure of traditional media to communicate the risk of aquatic invasive species with young people. This article highlights the changing way in which people consume information. Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks needs to improve its communication with the public (particularly young people) and so does Montana Trout Unlimited. Getting more good quality information out to more people in the ways that are most useful to them will only benefit the resource we are working to protect.

In the coming months we will be working to improve our electronic media communication. We will be increasing the information shared on our social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. The Trout Line will be available in a user-friendly electronic format and we will be asking members how they want to hear from us.

And for those of you who want to continue getting hard copies of newsletters via post, don’t worry. We will be happy to accommodate you. We want to embrace our conservation mission by reducing the amount of paper we send to folks who are happy to connect with us online. We realize that with nearly 4,500 members across the state, there is no single way to exchange information.

It will take some trial and error to find the right mix of traditional and electronic media, but in the end we hope to improve the flow of communication from MTU to you.

 

News

New leadership at Montana Trout Unlimited

by Bill Pfeiffer

Missoula, Montana, May 8, 2017 – Montana Trout Unlimited, which represents more than 4,300 conservation-minded anglers, organized among 13 TU volunteer chapters in the state, will have new professional leadership. After 23 ½ years as executive director, Bruce Farling is stepping down and into semi-retirement. He is being succeeded by David Brooks, who for the last year has served as the organization’s conservation director.

“The entire Montana Trout Unlimited State Council is excited for David to continue his excellent work with Montana TU in his new position as executive director. He is keenly aware of and committed to our conservation priorities. We believe he will pick up where Bruce Farling is leaving off in continuing the success of our organization,” said Chris Schustrom, Montana TU State Council Chair.

Brooks, an environmental historian, PhD and inveterate angler and hunter, will be stepping in to lead TU’s Montana grassroots members. Montana TU’s mission mirrors that of its national organization: Conserve, protect and restore Montana’s coldwater fisheries and their watersheds. Besides advocating for protection of habitat, streamflows and water quality, Montana TU and its volunteers organize and implement habitat restoration projects, manage programs focused on conservation and angling education for adults and kids, and advocate for maintaining Montana’s best in the nation statutes and rules for recreational access to rivers and streams. Formally chartered in 1964, Montana TU is one of 37 Trout Unlimited state councils across the nation.

“Over 50 years of conservation successes in keeping Montana’s waters clean, clear, and cold speak to the stellar leadership Montana TU has been fortunate enough to have in Bruce Farling, and now in David Brooks. Our continued efforts defending Montana against harmful mining proposals, restoring thousands of miles of rivers and streams, and engaging the next generation of angler conservationists are in good hands with our network of grassroots volunteers, Montana TU and national TU staff in Montana,” continued Schustrom.

Brooks leads a five-person staff headquartered in Missoula. He can be reached at [email protected], or at (406) 543-0054. Montana TU’s website and Facebook page can be accessed at www.montanatu.org.