
Comment period to close on Flathead River management draft
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) Federal agencies are once again planning a rewrite of a management plan for the Wild and Scenic sections of the Flathead River, but some conservation groups say the proposed regulations don’t go far enough to protect the historic rivers.
Friday is the deadline for people to submit comments on the proposed Flathead Comprehensive River Management Plan that will establish regulations on the three forks of the Flathead River that were designated as some of the first Wild and Scenic Rivers in October 1976. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act requires that federal agencies write river management plans to protect the character of the rivers that led to their listing.
As with most national forest management plans in Montana, the current river management plan was written in the early 1980s and needs to be updated. In 2017, Mary Riddle, former Glacier National Park chief of planning, and Colter Pence, Flathead National Forest river manager, started scoping meetings in an effort to update the plan. Both agencies are involved, because the river itself, along with the South and Middle forks, are part of the Flathead National Forest while the North Fork is shared by the two agencies. They hoped to finalize the plan for all 219 miles of river by 2021.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, along with Congressional budget cuts and agency staffing shortages, and everything was put on hold. In July 2019, managers with the Flathead National Forest and Glacier Park were able to release a proposed action plan. That has since been abandoned.
Then in February 2022, the agencies released a new timeline that had the draft management plan and environmental assessment being released in spring 2022 with the decision to follow by the end of summer. That didn’t happen.
About a month ago, the agencies started again with scoping and requested comments on the current document. The draft resource management plan and environmental assessment is scheduled to be finished in the late summer.
The three categories of Wild and Scenic Rivers - wild, scenic and recreational - all have different characteristics and levels of protection. The upper half of the Middle Fork and most of the South Fork above Hungry Horse Reservoir are designated as wild because they are free of impoundments, unpolluted and are mostly inaccessible except by trail since they are mostly in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. The lower sections of all three forks are designated recreational because of nearby roads and development and some impoundment. The upper three-quarters of the North Fork is designated as scenic because it has no dams and little development but it can be accessed by roads.
All the stream segments have several qualities that need to be preserved, from wildlife to native fisheries and clean water to scenic and historic aspects.
These were the values that University of Montana biologists John and Frank Craighead marveled at in 1958 when they took their first float trip down the Middle Fork and made it their goal to save it. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had proposed the Spruce Park Project, a smaller dam that would turn the Middle Fork into an 11-mile-long reservoir above West Glacier.
Water from the Middle Fork Reservoir would be piped below the mountain range to Hungry Horse Reservoir to run a new power plant. After spending several days floating through the wild country cradling the Middle Fork, the scientist-brothers realized federal protection was the only thing that could save wild rivers from federal development. So they worked with Idaho Sen. Frank Church to write the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
“Rivers and their watersheds are inseparable, and to maintain wild areas, we must preserve the rivers that drain them,” John Craighead wrote in a 1957 Naturalist Magazine article.
The Glacier region has changed greatly since the late 1950s, but the Flathead Forks still flow through it much as they have since the Wild and Scenic Act designation. But the human pressures on the rivers have grown immensely.
It might have been good for the pandemic to occur before the plan was finalized, because “user capacity” is one of the aspects the plan deals with. But user capacity was probably exceeded several times after more people flocked to Montana for its outdoor activities after the the pandemic started to stabilize in 2021. At the same time, Glacier National Park chose to create a ticketed-entry system for the Going-to-the-Sun Road to control its version of user capacity, that being an increasing number of vehicles as visitation rebounded to about 3 million annually.
To deal with that, the 2025 “proposed action” plan includes a permit system for all three forks of the Flathead River; a ban on motor vehicle camping or parking on gravel bars; limited group sizes; and a requirement for human waste containment within 200 feet of the river’s edge.
The plan says the top capacity for the North Fork scenic stretch is 180 people per day before the river is degraded, while the recreational stretch of the Middle Fork would top out at 1,280 people per day. Although the plan limits group size per permit, it doesn’t limit the number of permits.
Wilderness Watch questioned how the agencies came up with their capacity numbers, particularly for the 87 miles of the South and Middle forks that flow through the wilderness. They say they doubt such large numbers of people could float those streams without displacing wildlife, affecting the fisheries or ruining the wilderness experience of others. They argue that all those aspects have likely been diminished already.
The Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance also questioned the plan’s capacity numbers, calling them “educated guesses” because the agencies appear to lack data on how many people use the rivers. The plan also lacks data related to wildlife trends and has no provisions to do any monitoring so the Alliance wants that added to the plan.
The proposed plan would allow the four commercial outfitters authorized to float the Middle Fork to increase their annual user days to 136,000. For example, if one outfitter guided six boats of six people each in one day, that equates to 36 user days. From 2017 to 2020, commercial outfitters used about 55,000 user days on the lower Middle Fork. In 2021, that jumped to more than 100,000 when the east half of Glacier National Park was closed due to the pandemic. That number has declined but the average on the Middle Fork over the past five years has been about 72,000 user days.
Wilderness Watch and the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance said outfitting should be more limited, particularly in the wilderness area, and more permits should go toward educational trips or trips for the underserved.
As of Feb. 4, more than 1,000 comments had been submitted. Comments can be submitted electronically on the project webpage or mail comments to the Hungry Horse-Glacier View Ranger Station, P.O. Box 190340, 10 Hungry Horse Drive, Hungry Horse, MT 59919 or the Flathead National Forest Supervisor’s Office, 650 Wolfpack Way, Kalispell, MT 59901. Direct questions to Gary Blazejewski at 406-758-5272 or
gary.blazejewski@usda.gov.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@gmail.com.