Legislators ponder river recreation challenges

Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) The state has done little in recent years to manage recreational use on Montana’s rivers. Some people want more action, but that requires more people and funding.

The Legislative Environmental Quality Council spent Wednesday morning listening to testimony on the state of Montana’s rivers, mainly related its fisheries, river recreation and nutrient pollution, none of which are doing very well due to increasing human pressures.

Due to deepening drought, increasing use and rising water temperatures, rivers are less able to support Montana’s once legendary fisheries, panelists said. River habitat is declining, and trout populations, particularly in southwest Montana rivers, have dropped significantly over the past decade. That’s further complicated by the fact that nutrient loading - increasing amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus from human and animal waste, fertilizers and mine runoff - is the primary pollutant affecting more than a third of the river miles in the state, and declining streamflows cause those chemicals to increase in concentration.

But to the casual observer, the biggest change in the past decade is the crowding on the rivers. Some days, the conga line of rafts and inner tubes floating down rivers like the Madison, Bitterroot or middle Clark Fork seems never-ending.

Steve Luebeck of the Big Hole Watershed Committee said Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks needed to follow the lead of other states and regulate outfitting more. It also needed to implement more river recreation management plans like the ones on the Big Hole and Beaverhead rivers. But in the 26 years since the Big Hole plan was created, other efforts on the Bitterroot, Blackfoot and Madison rivers have faltered.

Luebeck said commercial use on the Madison River increased 109% between 2008 and 2019. That was before the pandemic, and today’s commercial use is probably even greater but FWP is no longer collecting that data, Luebeck said.

“While the legislature has delegated adequate authority to FWP to address the issues, the agency has demonstrated it doesn’t have the appetite to address the issue. Thus, a legislative approach is probably necessary,” Leubeck said.

Former FWP employees Randy Arnold and Charlie Sperry both said FWP’s inability to create recreation plans for other rivers was partly due to a lack of adequate staffing and funding. Without those resources, it’s almost impossible to collect the data needed to put together a plan that might need to justify limiting various uses on a river.

As an example of data needs, Arnold, former Region 2 supervisor, gave the example of complaints about increased use on the West Fork of the Bitterroot River in 2012. At that time, Arnold had only two employees to manage all the fishing access sites in Region 2.
An angler satisfaction survey showed a high use by nonresidents but still there was high satisfaction, which didn’t jibe with local sentiment. So FWP mailed surveys to fishing license holders in Ravalli County in 2013.

“That revealed a displacement. The residents who had grown up fishing on the West Fork and the main stem of the Bitterroot weren’t fishing there as much as they used to,” Arnold said. “That three-year attempt at getting the information we needed to get a council of people together to make decisions for real change took eight years. Meanwhile, on the mainstream of the Bitterroot, Rock Creek, the Blackfoot was an on-going steady pressure of recreation where we weren’t gathering that information.”

Sperry, who worked on social conflicts on rivers, said FWP has heard two questions from several citizen advisory councils: “Where’s the data?” and “Why aren’t you implementing our recommendations?” The department never had enough data to help councils make informed decisions. And when they did make decisions, as with the Madison River council, the agency never carried them out, Sperry said.

“In 2018, there was an internal program assessment. The obvious was beginning to emerge even then: exponential growth on our rivers; lack of capacity to keep up with the demand in the agency; and repeatedly having to say no, and as a result, not meeting public expectations and growing frustration among the public,” Sperry said. “I believe first and foremost, the agency needs more capacity to meet the demand. Without it, we’ll continue to be right where we’re at. With capacity, there’s an opportunity to update the river recreation rules and the commercial-use rules.”

Sperry said river recreation is akin to the state park system as far as the volume of use, so it should probably have its own program. Additional funding would need to be sustainable and long-term to provide for sufficient monitoring and data collection. Sperry suggested it could come from the conservation license fee or a permit.

“One mechanism, whether it's some kind of a stamp, some means for the public to contribute to help pay for the cost. It’s beyond anglers,” Sherry said. “The modern river recreation of today is well beyond that. Montana has grown exponentially on our rivers. Some funding mechanism that targets the users of these high-use rivers, beyond just commercial users, is something to think about.”

When it comes to commercial-use rules, Mike Bias, Fishing Outfitters Association of Montana director, pushed back on Luebeck’s claims that more regulation of outfitters was required. He presented data from a Montana State University study in 2024 that shows that guided trips are a minority of the use on the Big Hole and Madison rivers, and nonresidents now slightly outnumber residents on the Madison. Also an increasing amount of use is coming from non-fishing users.

“Outfitters are not the problem, we’re a portion of the problem,” Bias said. “In particular, on the Big Hole, we’re an order of magnitude less than all the other uses.”

Scott Vollmer, Montana Outfitters and Guides Association president, sided with Bias, saying focusing only on fishing outfitters wouldn’t solve the problem.

“When you look at our numbers, commercial use and outfitters and guides is about 12 to 20% of the total overall use. How can we manage numbers, how can we manage all, if we’re only managing 12 to 20%?” Vollmer said. “It needs to be a shared burden of conservation across all user groups. If you only regulate one, all other user groups will fill in and you end up with more.”

Rep. Joshua Seckinger, D-Bozeman, said some people blame outfitters for the crowding because they assume all the rafts on the rivers belong to outfitters. He suggested that people need to be educated on how to identify outfitters and guides on the river.

“Everyone has a boat; not everyone is a guide,” Seckinger said. “According to the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, there are 1,500 fewer guides in the state right now than there were at the end of 2025. We went from 3,500 to 2,000. So these continual attempts to regulate this billion-dollar industry seem to be short-sighted.”

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.