Every Montanan knows rivers matter, and no Montana river matters as much as the Yellowstone.
OK, so the Missouri’s right up there. But the fact that two of the state’s waterways belong on the short list of the great rivers of the United States — a list that includes the Mississippi, Columbia, Snake, Sacramento, Colorado, Chesapeake, the Ohio, and the Rio Grande — says a lot.
The Yellowstone is the last of our great free-flowing rivers. Other than some irrigation diversions in eastern Montana, it flows undammed 692 miles from Yellowstone National Park to its confluence with the Missouri River in North Dakota.
Lower Yellowstone Falls is one of the iconic vistas of the planet. Yankee Jim Canyon is a hoot on a whitewater raft and the late, great writer Jim Harrison declared the Yellowstone near Livingston to be the finest brown trout fishery in the country.
What perplexes me about this is why, with such treasures in our midst, we can’t seem to take proper care of them.
The outbreak of a fish-killing parasite and the closure of 183 miles of the Yellowstone is just the river’s most recent indignity as thousands of dead whitefish now line its banks. But in 2011, and again in 2015, pipelines crossing the river burst, spilling oil into the waterway.
It’s still too soon to know the exact cause of the parasitic infection, but there’s certainly reason for us to look in the mirror. The world is getting warmer and the science points to the CO2 humans produce as the most likely culprit.
Warmer water stresses salmonids such as trout, char, grayling, and especially whitefish. Whitefish are much maligned by some anglers, but they are the trout stream equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. Whitefish are river divas, more easily stressed when things aren’t just so in their dressing room, or when the air conditioning acts up.
Malfunctioning air conditioning is kind of a metaphor for what happened to rivers in the Northern Rockies this summer. The snowpack was in good shape in early spring, but summer temperatures arrived too soon and by July rivers were low and warm. Too warm for salmonids.
Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials say the parasite that caused the fish kill seems to be swamping fish in the river, so massive are the levels of infection they are finding dead fish. The parasite causes proliferative kidney disease in whitefish and trout, with a fatality rate approaching 90 percent.
While folks in the Livingston area are hurting due to the river closure — outdoor recreation is, after all, a $6 billion industry in Montana — FWP officials have said they won’t consider reopening the river until water temperatures drop to at least 55 degrees. Recent cooler weather did have temperatures dipping down into that range overnight.
Temperature is key for salmonids. They need that diva air conditioning running full tilt. And that need for cold water is apparently why previous outbreaks of the parasite have been in freestone rivers rather than tailwaters. We may not like dams, but they can cool off rivers.
When the water warms, fish get stressed, and stressed fish can’t fight off infections the way they can when healthy. There’s a bit of a chicken or the egg question here. Does the warmer water allow parasite populations to explode, or is it that the stressed fish can’t fend infection off the way they do when the river is cool?
I feel for the guides and outfitters in the Livingston area, as well as the businesses that cater to their clients. Outdoor recreation isn’t harmless, but it’s a heck of a lot easier on the environment than the CO2 producing activities some argue are the solution to economic growth.
But if we’re going to build livelihoods off our rivers and streams, we first need to protect them.