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Cooperative conservation - Industry, environmentalists team up to create Bull River wildlife area
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
Standing in a meadow between a series of ponds, several people listen to the dedication ceremony announcing the protection of 1,800 acres for inclusion in the Bull River Wildlife Management Area. The area includes a diversity of wetlands, grasslands and forests.
Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian
BULL LAKE - Cal Ryder woke up Wednesday morning to a big bull moose and a couple of mule deer bucks.
Before he made it five miles from his front door, Ryder had spotted elk, white-tailed deer and an eagle.
It was, he admits, an appropriate start to what would be a very special day in his neck of the woods.
Ryder, a naturalist and Audubon Society member, lives in the lowland forest along Montana's Bull River, a wild stretch of woods nestled between the East and West Cabinet Mountains south of Troy.
The scenic five miles he traveled Wednesday put Ryder on the doorstep of the state's newest public wildland, the Bull River Wildlife Management Area.
Managed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Bull River WMA is a remarkable sprawl of wetlands and dryland forests, clean streams and ancient hemlocks.
Equally remarkable, perhaps, is the complicated web of political partnerships that led to Wednesday's hand-shaking, back-slapping, ribbon-cutting celebration.
Chris Smith of FWP called it "a tremendous example" of cooperation. Bob Anderson of Avista Utilities said it was "truly astonishing." Plum Creek Timber Co.'s Jerry Wolcott called the deal "a great opportunity." Don Morgan of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service called it "amazing," and the Conservation Fund's Mark Elsbree said it was "unprecedented," and "simply terrific."
Any one of them could have been talking about the wild landscape, but instead they were referring to the prickly long-term negotiations that made the 1,800-acre wildlife management area possible.
It's hard to say where the idea began, because each of the players started from a different spot on the philosophical map. But the beginning, if there is one, likely emerged from Avista's work to relicense its hydroelectric facilities on the lower Clark Fork River.
It was the late 1990s and Avista's 50-year leases were expiring on both the Noxon and Cabinet Gorge dams, the company's biggest hydroelectric producers.
Before going to the federal government for approval, the company first went to local stakeholders, hoping to hammer out an agreement that would uproot any opposition before it went to seed.
The result, after years of negotiations, was a "living license," a document signed by more than three dozen parties and outlining, among other things, Avista's obligations to conserve critical habitat.
A flexible plan, it called for ongoing habitat studies and land management responsive to the results.
Of course, it also greased the skids for Avista's license approval, and made good business sense.
After the negotiations, the stakeholders stuck together, meeting twice a year to talk about conservation options. It wasn't long before they learned the local mining company wanted to unload some ground along the biologically diverse Bull River corridor. Plum Creek had some adjacent land it also wanted to sell. And Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks was interested too, as the area is considered critical to big game and bull trout.
"It was perfect," said Avista's Nate Hall, because it also happened to be just upstream from another Avista conservation project.
Problem was, his company didn't have the cash to seal the deal.
Enter the Conservation Fund. A national nonprofit that facilitates such conservation pacts, the fund has helped preserve 4 million acres nationwide and 75,000 acres in Montana. When Avista came knocking, it seemed a perfect marriage.
Avista already had a couple of million dollars to bring to the table. The feds, by way of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, promised more than $4 million more (part of about $80 million granted nationwide). But that grant money would take a while to trickle down, and not everyone could wait.
So the Conservation Fund floated a "bridge" loan, $4.6 million, and the wheels started turning on a complicated $6.6 million deal, with private money leveraged by federal funds.
It's hard to imagine all those years of high-level and high-pressure machinations as you follow Cal Ryder's route into the Bull River Wildlife Management Area. The dusty road snakes through a marshy lowland, a spring-fed backwater growing cattails and turtles, where slick-headed ducks dip down to browse the bottoms.
A mature cedar-hemlock forest rings the vast wetland, with giant cottonwoods and stark snags leaning precariously against the sky - high-rise apartments for woodpeckers and other cavity nesters.
Birdsong is everywhere, only giving way to wind-driven silence as you climb above the cedars and into a mixed upland forest of larch and pine and brushy browse.
The 1,800 wildly diverse acres nestle against a tremendous backdrop of rocky peaks, a protected wilderness still jacketed in winter's white. It is, without doubt, a place well beyond adjectives, straight out of the mythic West.
That myth, however rare, is no accident in today's world. The private citizens and companies who not so long ago owned this piece of paradise were interested in selling; and in today's market, selling means subdivision.
It is perhaps a new myth in the making, then, that so many people from so many backgrounds found the political will to make the Bull River their common ground.
His back to the ragged Cabinet summits, his gaze across 400 acres of rippling wetlands, Don Morgan of the Fish and Wildlife Service could see only the remarkable landscape of human intention.
"The thing that really strikes me is the partnerships," he said, adding that "this type of thing could not be accomplished without those partnerships."
Environmentalists and agencies, loggers and miners, real estate agents, hunters and anglers, and even local politicians shared a common vision and focused their combined will, he said.
"It was very complex," Avista's Anderson said of the deal, "and it took a lot of work."
Now, with the work done, FWP will manage about 1,300 acres to the north, and Avista will control nearly 600 adjacent acres to the south. It's all protected in perpetuity with conservation easements, open for hunting and fishing and even Ryder's birdwatching.
He's seen trumpeter swans here, flycatchers and buntings and warblers, some 90 species in all. Ryder waved his arm at an expanse of forested hillside across the valley, a roadless wildland separated from the WMA only by the thin ribbon of Highway 56, the Bull River Road.
The green bench he stands on, sandwich in hand, is winter home to 130 or so elk, and the area's two major drainages meet on this spot, a natural corridor for migrating animals. Far below, where the Bull River's spring rush sounds a bit like applause, bull trout are making a comeback, silent and unseen, the landscape's unconscious thought submerged beneath the alert presence of the East Cabinet peaks.
Submerged as they are, bull trout nevertheless remain keenly on the mind of Nate Hall, who manages lands, wildlife and recreation for Avista. His company's dams impede the native fish, and a big part of the collaborative agreement that brought him here hinges on helping the threatened species.
"This," said biologist Larry Lockard of the Fish and Wildlife Service, "is our primary recovery zone in terms of bull trout."
Hall said Avista was especially interested in this site "because if we weren't able to protect the headwaters, anything we might do downstream would be impacted."
In a way, even these marshy lowlands are headwaters. The cold springs that feed the wetland provide some 30 percent of the river's flow during the driest part of the year, adjusting he temperature in favor of trout. And above the WMA, the high country headwaters are locked behind a designated wall of wilderness.
But while bull trout were the key, Hall said, "there were also grizzly bears, elk, hunting, recreation, you name it. It has everything."
Just as Cal Ryder proved during his five-minute morning commute.
"It's great habitat," Ryder said of the WMA. "And it's beautiful country."
Avista's Anderson seemed to agree, the hard work apparently forgotten and now caught up in the spread laid out before him.
"Gosh," he said to his many partners, "let's go find another one and do it again."
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
Standing in a meadow between a series of ponds, several people listen to the dedication ceremony announcing the protection of 1,800 acres for inclusion in the Bull River Wildlife Management Area. The area includes a diversity of wetlands, grasslands and forests.
Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian
BULL LAKE - Cal Ryder woke up Wednesday morning to a big bull moose and a couple of mule deer bucks.
Before he made it five miles from his front door, Ryder had spotted elk, white-tailed deer and an eagle.
It was, he admits, an appropriate start to what would be a very special day in his neck of the woods.
Ryder, a naturalist and Audubon Society member, lives in the lowland forest along Montana's Bull River, a wild stretch of woods nestled between the East and West Cabinet Mountains south of Troy.
The scenic five miles he traveled Wednesday put Ryder on the doorstep of the state's newest public wildland, the Bull River Wildlife Management Area.
Managed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Bull River WMA is a remarkable sprawl of wetlands and dryland forests, clean streams and ancient hemlocks.
Equally remarkable, perhaps, is the complicated web of political partnerships that led to Wednesday's hand-shaking, back-slapping, ribbon-cutting celebration.
Chris Smith of FWP called it "a tremendous example" of cooperation. Bob Anderson of Avista Utilities said it was "truly astonishing." Plum Creek Timber Co.'s Jerry Wolcott called the deal "a great opportunity." Don Morgan of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service called it "amazing," and the Conservation Fund's Mark Elsbree said it was "unprecedented," and "simply terrific."
Any one of them could have been talking about the wild landscape, but instead they were referring to the prickly long-term negotiations that made the 1,800-acre wildlife management area possible.
It's hard to say where the idea began, because each of the players started from a different spot on the philosophical map. But the beginning, if there is one, likely emerged from Avista's work to relicense its hydroelectric facilities on the lower Clark Fork River.
It was the late 1990s and Avista's 50-year leases were expiring on both the Noxon and Cabinet Gorge dams, the company's biggest hydroelectric producers.
Before going to the federal government for approval, the company first went to local stakeholders, hoping to hammer out an agreement that would uproot any opposition before it went to seed.
The result, after years of negotiations, was a "living license," a document signed by more than three dozen parties and outlining, among other things, Avista's obligations to conserve critical habitat.
A flexible plan, it called for ongoing habitat studies and land management responsive to the results.
Of course, it also greased the skids for Avista's license approval, and made good business sense.
After the negotiations, the stakeholders stuck together, meeting twice a year to talk about conservation options. It wasn't long before they learned the local mining company wanted to unload some ground along the biologically diverse Bull River corridor. Plum Creek had some adjacent land it also wanted to sell. And Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks was interested too, as the area is considered critical to big game and bull trout.
"It was perfect," said Avista's Nate Hall, because it also happened to be just upstream from another Avista conservation project.
Problem was, his company didn't have the cash to seal the deal.
Enter the Conservation Fund. A national nonprofit that facilitates such conservation pacts, the fund has helped preserve 4 million acres nationwide and 75,000 acres in Montana. When Avista came knocking, it seemed a perfect marriage.
Avista already had a couple of million dollars to bring to the table. The feds, by way of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, promised more than $4 million more (part of about $80 million granted nationwide). But that grant money would take a while to trickle down, and not everyone could wait.
So the Conservation Fund floated a "bridge" loan, $4.6 million, and the wheels started turning on a complicated $6.6 million deal, with private money leveraged by federal funds.
It's hard to imagine all those years of high-level and high-pressure machinations as you follow Cal Ryder's route into the Bull River Wildlife Management Area. The dusty road snakes through a marshy lowland, a spring-fed backwater growing cattails and turtles, where slick-headed ducks dip down to browse the bottoms.
A mature cedar-hemlock forest rings the vast wetland, with giant cottonwoods and stark snags leaning precariously against the sky - high-rise apartments for woodpeckers and other cavity nesters.
Birdsong is everywhere, only giving way to wind-driven silence as you climb above the cedars and into a mixed upland forest of larch and pine and brushy browse.
The 1,800 wildly diverse acres nestle against a tremendous backdrop of rocky peaks, a protected wilderness still jacketed in winter's white. It is, without doubt, a place well beyond adjectives, straight out of the mythic West.
That myth, however rare, is no accident in today's world. The private citizens and companies who not so long ago owned this piece of paradise were interested in selling; and in today's market, selling means subdivision.
It is perhaps a new myth in the making, then, that so many people from so many backgrounds found the political will to make the Bull River their common ground.
His back to the ragged Cabinet summits, his gaze across 400 acres of rippling wetlands, Don Morgan of the Fish and Wildlife Service could see only the remarkable landscape of human intention.
"The thing that really strikes me is the partnerships," he said, adding that "this type of thing could not be accomplished without those partnerships."
Environmentalists and agencies, loggers and miners, real estate agents, hunters and anglers, and even local politicians shared a common vision and focused their combined will, he said.
"It was very complex," Avista's Anderson said of the deal, "and it took a lot of work."
Now, with the work done, FWP will manage about 1,300 acres to the north, and Avista will control nearly 600 adjacent acres to the south. It's all protected in perpetuity with conservation easements, open for hunting and fishing and even Ryder's birdwatching.
He's seen trumpeter swans here, flycatchers and buntings and warblers, some 90 species in all. Ryder waved his arm at an expanse of forested hillside across the valley, a roadless wildland separated from the WMA only by the thin ribbon of Highway 56, the Bull River Road.
The green bench he stands on, sandwich in hand, is winter home to 130 or so elk, and the area's two major drainages meet on this spot, a natural corridor for migrating animals. Far below, where the Bull River's spring rush sounds a bit like applause, bull trout are making a comeback, silent and unseen, the landscape's unconscious thought submerged beneath the alert presence of the East Cabinet peaks.
Submerged as they are, bull trout nevertheless remain keenly on the mind of Nate Hall, who manages lands, wildlife and recreation for Avista. His company's dams impede the native fish, and a big part of the collaborative agreement that brought him here hinges on helping the threatened species.
"This," said biologist Larry Lockard of the Fish and Wildlife Service, "is our primary recovery zone in terms of bull trout."
Hall said Avista was especially interested in this site "because if we weren't able to protect the headwaters, anything we might do downstream would be impacted."
In a way, even these marshy lowlands are headwaters. The cold springs that feed the wetland provide some 30 percent of the river's flow during the driest part of the year, adjusting he temperature in favor of trout. And above the WMA, the high country headwaters are locked behind a designated wall of wilderness.
But while bull trout were the key, Hall said, "there were also grizzly bears, elk, hunting, recreation, you name it. It has everything."
Just as Cal Ryder proved during his five-minute morning commute.
"It's great habitat," Ryder said of the WMA. "And it's beautiful country."
Avista's Anderson seemed to agree, the hard work apparently forgotten and now caught up in the spread laid out before him.
"Gosh," he said to his many partners, "let's go find another one and do it again."
