Eventually this long dreary spring will give way to summer. When it does, folks will flock to their favorite rivers for that great Montana tradition: summer floating.
But folks who enjoy the pleasant stretch of Swan River just downstream of Swan Lake are in for a disappointment. The popular access site off Rainbow Drive in Ferndale has been closed by the Lake County supervisors, and even the supes’ most optimistic timetable for reopening means it will remain closed for a good part of the summer. The result will be havoc, and I worry cascading conflicts could lead to a permanent loss of access on a stretch of the Swan that already has few secure sites to launch boats.
The Lake County-owned access site is a small patch of riverfront, created as parkland when the surrounding subdivision was drawn up. There’s a roundabout, though apparently some years ago a disapproving neighbor lined boulders across the bank to keep trailered boats out.
The access site is popular: too popular perhaps. On hot summer days parking spills out onto the narrow road. Parking is allowed on the east side of Rainbow Drive, and a handful of signs announce there’s no parking on the west side. When it’s busy the signs are ignored. With cars on both sides of the road emergency vehicles can’t get through.
Bill Barron, chairman of the Lake County supes, said board members are advocates for access and that the closure is only temporary until staffers can meet with folks from Flathead County (the Swan flows north from the Rainbow Drive access barely a mile before it leaves Lake County) and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, to devise better parking options.
That’s great, except most of the options Barron said were being considered — such as creating parking off site and shuttling river users to Rainbow Drive — are long-term, and probably costly solutions.
The only real short-term fix is to pair an aggressive public education campaign with better “No Parking” signage on the west side of Rainbow Drive, and then aggressively tow violators.
In the meantime, it’s useful to remember that blocking access to deal with overuse of a recreation site is almost never a solution; it just shifts the problem. Swan River floaters, when confronted with a “No Trespassing” sign at their favorite access, aren’t going to say, “Heck, who wants to float anyway?”
Instead, many of these floaters will shift their attention to the nearest access, a narrow strip of land in the South Ferndale Bridge right-of-way. That site is even more ill-suited for the influx it’s about to receive,
By sending the problem cascading down the Swan, Lake County’s decision to block access may put fishing in jeopardy along that entire stretch of river. Since that wildcat boat blockage at Rainbow Drive has been allowed to stand, options for trailered boats are limited. There’s that undeveloped site at the South Ferndale Bridge, and then a difficult to use launch farther down river at an FWP access site.
There’s no threat we’ll lose the FWP access, but that site is near the tail end of the best fishing water in this reach of river, as well as a bit of whitewater.
It’s great that Lake County officials are saying the right things about supporting access, but so far they are doing the wrong thing, no matter how well intentioned. Closing access right as the summer floating season begins isn’t a solution, it’s compounding the problem and may lead to a whole new group of Ferndale residents getting frustrated with floaters searching for the river.
Instead we should reopen the access and pull those boulders someone had no business placing in the first place. And let’s make a concerted tri-agency effort to inform the floating public about safe parking on Rainbow Drive.
The temperature is rising. The time to move is now.