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On a recent, scorching Sunday afternoon, I wandered a few blocks from my front door to Rattlesnake Creek. The Rattlesnake Mountains off my right shoulder glared in the mid-day Montana sun, the bare rock naked of its usual covering of snow. In flip-flops and an old bathing suit, I passed dogs and children playing in the park and slipped into the shade of the century-old Ponderosas and cottonwoods bordering Rattlesnake Creek. I edged out over slippery rocks into a deep pool, and let out a muffled shriek as I fully submerged in the clear mountain stream.
The shriek was more for show, though—the creek wasn’t as cold as I’d expected. In the past few weeks, its flow dropped from a raging whitewater of snowmelt to a pleasant gurgle passing only a few inches above the colorful green and red rocks. As I pulled myself up on a warm rock, I reflected on the cycle of rising and falling waters I can watch year-round—from the mountaintops to the creek to the boggy areas that come and go in my backyard.
This cycle ripples out from my backyard to encompass the waters of the vast Clark Fork watershed, the state of Montana, and the northern Rockies as a whole. It’s a familiar pattern of snowmelt and runoff—big floods in the spring with dwindling water as autumn nears. But in recent years, our streams seem to shrink and gasp sooner. And the waters are warmer in July and August too, leading to some uncomfortably hot trout as the summer stretches out.
A recent report released by the Clark Fork Coalition in partnership with the National Wildlife Federation confirms these observations and highlights many others—all of which tell us that the rhythms in our watershed are shifting, touched by climate change in starkly visible ways. Low Flows, Hot Trout summarizes decades of data on rain, temperature, glaciers, wildlife, fish, and rivers, pointing to a clear conclusion: the Clark Fork River basin is warming, and the effects cascade throughout our ecosystem and our economy.
Scrolling through the months and the metrics from the 1950s, we see that March in western Montana is hotter, more precipitation falls as rain, spring snowmelt arrives earlier, extreme wildfires are more frequent, fishing closures appear more often, and glaciers are making hastier retreats. And the projections years out show much of the same.
For many of us, these changes are putting a lifetime of patterns out of sync and creating conditions tangibly different from what we cherish about living in western Montana. They’re also delivering the message that climate change is happening here. It’s happening now. And it may drastically reshape how we experience our hometown rivers—our ribbons of life.
Often, when we consider the complicated global dilemma of climate change, it’s tempting to detach, and retreat into our familiar routines and landscapes. Low Flows, Hot Trout brings climate change down to the grassroots level, looking at its impact on western Montana’s local businesses and backyard trails. The report features interviews with watershed citizens from firefighter to rancher, realtor to fisherman, biologist to hunter. It emphasizes that although climate change is a global phenomenon, it has personal implications for each of us.
While not all of the associated impacts are bad—for example, we can expect a longer growing season and improved survival of deer and elk over the winter—we will also experience more forest disease, more wildfires and warmer waters in our trout streams. Some studies have estimated that we could lose between 5 and 30 percent of trout habitat in western Montana over the next century. And with less water stored as snow in the mountains, we can expect impacts to many sectors of our “snowpack economy,” like agriculture, tourism, hydroelectric power generation, and forest and range industries.
So how do we act on these scientific findings? And what does it all mean for our way of life in the Clark Fork watershed? Low Flows, Hot Trout takes a look at individual, community and regional actions and policies that will protect our celebrated landscape in the face of climate change. This includes mitigating the causes of climate change, such as reducing Montana’s greenhouse gas emissions and curtailing any new coal-fired power plants. It also means adapting to the changing patterns by using our resources more wisely.
This is especially crucial as climate realities are juxtaposed against the rapid development threatening our rivers and wildlands. Looking down the road at big-picture changes in the Clark Fork watershed, it’s crystal clear that a warming climate coupled with shifting land-use patterns will create considerable challenges for protecting our resources. From 2000 to 2007, the Clark Fork watershed’s growth rate averaged 10 percent, or 25,857 more people in the basin. In 2007 alone, this translated to 3,781 new housing lots, all of them requiring roads, water, and energy.
One of the biggest hurdles of the next century will be how to reconcile the increased demand for water resources with our diminishing supply. As Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer points out in Low Flows, Hot Trout, “We need to make sure we’re managing rivers as whole watersheds, not on a stream-by-stream basis.” The same goes for our lands, our energy supply, our forests—looking at big-picture change requires a careful lens, and lots of community input.
Local policies at the county level are crucial for creating thoughtful, integrated land and water use patterns that minimize sprawl and maximize our water and energy efficiency. These local policies must be augmented with fair state regulations as well, to keep our rivers clean, local economies strong, agricultural lands producing, and to protect waters users of all types, including fish and wildlife.
The bottom line is this: plenty can be done about climate change right here at home and everyone can make a difference. The goal is simple: allow our watershed to buffer the impacts of global warming, and continue to offer a beautiful, thriving backdrop for residents and visitors.
As Low Flows, Hot Trout shows, climate change in the Clark Fork River basin presents a different picture of our tomorrow. It presents a challenge, as well as an exciting opportunity for Montanans to lead the way with innovative water and wildlife management, generating homegrown fuels like wind and solar power, and creating a restoration economy that benefits our communities and our rivers.
Please join us in taking a look at where we are along the spectrum of a warming West—together, we can spark discussion, generate action, and illuminate the path toward solutions. Meanwhile, take a stroll over to your backyard creek. Jump in. Splash around. Enjoy the miracle of cold mountain water, long Montana light, and sun-baked rocks alongside shimmering cottonwood leaves. I’ll meet you in the stream.
Brianna Randall is the Water Policy Director for the Clark Fork Fork Coalition, a non-profit river conservation group based in Missoula, Montana.
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