Raft Guides Share the Stewardship Load at Flathead River Access Sites

When Maddison Thelen returned to work a second season as a guide for Glacier Guides and Montana Raft, she found herself in a company-wide meeting featuring a big announcement: alongside their guiding duties, employees would now have the option to volunteer to clean vault toilets at river access sites the outfitters use along the three forks of the Flathead River.

Thelen felt elated.

“It’s something I’ve been feeling pretty passionate about for a while,” she said. “Having the opportunity come up like that was pretty awesome and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.”

Thelen was referring to what the cleaning duties represented — a chance to help support a beleaguered U.S. Forest Service workforce by taking on river maintenance and environmental stewardship responsibilities.

With federal staffing cuts spreading the Forest Service thin, the Flathead National Forest has partnered with river outfitters to maintain river access sites along the non-wilderness portions of the North and Middle Forks of the Flathead Wild and Scenic River. Three river outfitters — Glacier Guides and Montana Raft, Glacier Raft Co., and Wild River Adventures — send guides or other staff to the sites to clean vault toilets, pick up garbage, identify any hazards, and post any new signage from the Forest Service.

Each company visits three access points twice a week, rotating sites weekly and following a schedule delineated by the agency. The rotation includes Polebridge, Ford River and the Canadian border river access sites; Bear Creek, Paola Creek and Cascadilla Flat river access sites; and Moccasin Creek, Great Northern Flats and Glacier Rim river access sites. Forest Service employees periodically monitor the cleaning to ensure it’s up to standard.

“I think when you’re cleaning pit toilets you’re not like, ‘yeah, favorite thing,’” said Thelen. “Sometimes they can be dirty, gross jobs, but when you think about it, it’s really just cleaning up micro trash and restocking toilet paper. It’s really an easy thing to help out.”

Stewardship programs are not new — horse packers and trail crew organizations have partnered with the Forest Service to help care for trails in the backcountry of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, and the Flathead Rivers Alliance has volunteer river ambassadors that also share in stewardship of the river access sites. This is the first time, however, that the Forest Service has partnered with the outfitters that hold special use permits for the North and Middle Forks of the Flathead River.

The Flathead National Forest authorizes outfitting and guiding as a special use in part because it affords the public access to a recreation experience while balancing that use with environmental safeguards for the Wild and Scenic River system. Outfitters and guides promote and teach river and bear safety practices, for instance, as well as resource protection (such as the proper fishing techniques) and river etiquette.

In conversations about river access site upkeep this year with Colter Pence, wilderness manager for the Flathead National Forest’s Hungry Horse and Glacier View districts, Mike Cooney, general manager for Glacier Raft Co., said that Pence raised the idea of using the stewardship offset clause historically employed by wilderness trail crews.

“We’ve been going through the comprehensive river management study, and there’s been an increase of trash and human waste along the river,” said Cooney. “Closing down the sites would only increase the problem … Nobody had ever really thought about doing this with the river system.”

Outfitter-guide permit holders pay a percentage of their revenue each year to the Flathead National Forest for the use of the river. With the stewardship program, a portion of that will be reimbursed at the end of each year, though for the outfitters, it’s really just a bonus, said Lexi Wood, co-owner of Wild River Adventures alongside her husband, Justin. As their guides are busy with full schedules, the Woods have shouldered most of the responsibility so far for cleaning sites the outfitter is responsible for.

“That part of it is great, but it wasn’t necessarily a selling point,” Lexi Wood said. “My instinct was just ‘what can we do to help?’”

At Glacier Raft Co., Cooney said the response from employees has been equally positive. Guides can volunteer to pick up shifts on their days off and are paid on an hourly basis for the maintenance.

“The beauty of this is that I have not had to assign anybody the tasks,” said Cooney. “It’s on a volunteer basis, and there was a great response from employees because it’s a stewardship thing. They value the river just as much as anybody else does and recognize the value of providing the service. We have a big focus on conservation and stewardship. The river is our livelihood. It’s our philosophy that it’s for everybody out there, whether they’re clients or not.”

The program officially launched on June 1 and will run through the end of the summer floating season in September.  

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