BP Oil Spill - the Montana Connection

While traveling across Montana this June, a common sight was of Montana rivers rushing towards the Missouri River, and on to the Gulf of Mexico. With the heavy rains of June, these rivers have been carrying a big load of sediment.

At the same time, coastal Louisiana, an area much in the news these days, keeps shrinking. Every 38 minutes an area the size of a football field disappears, washed away by waves and tides of the Gulf of Mexico.

And, at the same time, a million gallons of crude oil surges out of that BP deep-water oil well every day, the ongoing disaster story that dominates the news media.

Now, let’s connect the dots.

At one time, the sediment from the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers here in southwest Montana, along with the Marias, Milk, Yellowstone, Musselshell, Judith, Tongue and Powder Rivers, to name just a few, emptied into the Missouri River, starting a long journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Naturally, much of that sediment settled out along the way, forming sand bars, islands, replenishing riparian areas, but eventually washing downstream to the Mississippi River system and finally settling out on the coast of Louisiana, forming islands and wetlands.

That sediment doesn’t go far anymore. Most sediment on the main stem of the Missouri settles out in the string of dams on the upper Missouri. The sediment from the Yellowstone system settles out as the river merges with the Missouri at the Montana/North Dakota border and the next great impoundment, Lake Sakakawea.

Now, consider all the rivers of America’s heartland that used to dump sediment loads into the Mississippi which are now dammed and otherwise harnessed in the name of progress, whether that means hydroelectric generation, flood control, or irrigation.

The sediment that does get carried to the Mississippi gets rushed along by levees, dikes, and shipping channels. Much of that sediment, which previously spread out in a great river delta, forming and replenishing islands and wetlands, now ends up in deep water areas of the Gulf of Mexico.

As a result of all that progress, the coastal wetlands of Louisiana have lost much of their vitality and are prone to erosion, a situation dramatically demonstrated several years ago when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered the coast, and some islands and whole communities were literally washed away.

None of this is new. It’s a process that has been going on since the 1930s. It’s estimated that 2,300 square miles of coastal Louisiana marshlands have disappeared since then.

And now we have the BP oil well disaster.

If that oil well were centered in Butte, the contaminated area would extend west to the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. To the south, it would extend to near Idaho Falls. To the north and east the spill would cover Great Falls, Lewistown, Bozeman and Big Timber.

From daily news reports, it seems increasingly clear that the BP corporate culture isn’t necessarily safety first. In addition, other observers have noted that other countries with offshore oil resources have more stringent environmental protections, including requiring that well drillers put down a relief well at the same time they establish a primary oil well. BP is currently trying to put a relief well in place, but it likely won’t be complete until August. Meanwhile, the well keeps gushing out a million gallons of oil a day, only a small part of which is recovered.

The loss of coastal wetlands and barrier islands means more oil is headed for the mainland, and oil damage to existing wetlands further weakens the already fragile system.

It’s only going to get worse. Tony Dolle, the Communications Director for Ducks Unlimited, who has spent most of the last two months in Louisiana as part of a DU task force, asks, “How are we going to tell 13 million ducks and geese they’d be better off not coming to Louisiana this winter?”

Like an old Cecil B. DeMille movie epic, the Gulf oil disaster has a cast of thousands and is years in the making.

On the web: www.ifitwasmyhome.com, www.du.org, www.vanishingparadise.org.

The Kid's a Natural

The kid’s a natural. No doubt about it.

That kid is a great-nephew, one of my brother’s grandchildren. Young Nicholas Vang doesn’t have a lot of mileage on him, but he has talent and inclination for the great outdoors, and with his uncle Dan showing him the way, I see a lot of great outings in his future. This spring, Dan called in a wild turkey gobbler for Nicholas, and now he’s taking him fishing at every opportunity.

In April I wrote about the first Earth Day and the landmark environmental legislation that followed, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. American waters responded to cleanup and rivers and streams that were all but dead when I was a kid now run clear and nurture abundant populations of game fish. The Zumbro River, which runs through my hometown of Zumbrota, Minnesota, is definitely one of them.

My nephew, Dan Vang, lives on the banks of the Zumbro River, just a mile out of town, and just down the hill from where one of my uncles (this story, it seems, is all about uncles and nephews) lived most of his life. Dan is an outdoors enthusiast, and his home is filled with antlers, mounted deer heads, and sporting art from a lot of ducks and pheasants banquets. There’s a pheasant pen in the back yard and then there’s Gus, Dan’s big yellow Labrador retriever.

As for the river, there are not only smallmouth bass in the stream; there are trout and even muskies. I looked forward to fishing the Zumbro until heavy rains turned the stream high and muddy—just like our Montana streams are right now. When Dan and Nicholas came to pick me up, he suggested we put a canoe into a tailwater, a stretch of the river downstream from a hydro dam.

It was raining when we launched the canoe into the river, but the water was crystal clear and running swiftly over gravelly riffles. Dan and Nicholas were casting lures with spinning rods while I used a flyrod.

Smallmouth bass are notorious for liking warm, sunny weather for working up a good appetite, and this definitely wasn’t a great day, but it didn’t take long before Nicholas called out, “I’ve got one!” He held up a juvenile smallmouth that flipped off the hook before I could take a picture.

Drifting a streamer across a riffle, I felt a little tug on my fly, and then landed a smallmouth of my own, which set a personal record for me, as undoubtedly the smallest bass I’ve ever caught. It was all of two inches long.

A little later, Nicholas called out, “I’ve got another one!” He held up another bass, this one obligingly staying on long enough to be photographed, before Nicholas expertly released the fish back into the water (a catch-and-release area for smallies).

Nicholas was wearing knee-high rubber boots and a rain suit, though it didn’t keep him dry as he waded into waist-deep water to cast towards a seam in the current on the other side of the river. After we finished our float downstream to the takeout point, he just laughed as he dumped a couple quarts of water out of each boot.
That evening I suggested a short lesson in flycasting. Nicholas watched intently as Dan hesitantly made a few casts. When I handed the rod to Nicholas, there was no hesitation. He made a false cast or two and then proceeded to make powerful 30-foot casts without a bit of difficulty. “We’ve got to start flyfishing,” he informed Uncle Dan.

Flyfishing, of course, is one of those specially paved and highly polished routes to perdition. You start off just wanting to catch a few fish and then, before you know it, you’re tying flies and bass bugs, building rods, studying aquatic entomology, and going to Trout Unlimited meetings. It’s a life that’s suddenly more complicated.

Though the distances between Montana and Minnesota will make it a bit difficult to watch Nicholas learn these new outdoor skills, there’s no doubt he’ll do well. The kid’s a natural.