About the Clark Fork River

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• The Clark Fork River watershed covers a vast 14-million-acre landscape, spanning nearly all of western Montana and a portion of northern Idaho

• With its 28,000 miles of rivers and streams, it is Montana's largest river by volume, forming the easternmost headwaters of the mighty Columbia River

• Its headwaters originate high along the Continental Divide near Butte in small streams that join to form Silver Bow and Warm Springs Creeks. From the confluence of these creeks it then winds 320 river miles to its terminus at stunning Lake Pend Oreille near Sandpoint, ID

• This extensive river system supports nearly half a million people and millions of annual visitors, providing water to local communities, agricultural operations, and businesses

• It sustains abundant fish and wildlife populations, including native bull trout and cutthroat trout, prized wild trout species, including browns and rainbows; grizzly and black bears, moose, elk, deer, mountain lions, wolverines, mountain goats; numerous raptors and songbirds, and many more species

• It flows through some of largest, healthiest, and most intact ecosystems in the Lower 48, providing shelter, cover and crucial migration and movement corridors between the Crown of the Continent, High Divide, and Selway-Bitterroot Ecosystems

• The Clark Fork is an enormously important cultural and economic resource, providing world-class recreational opportunities, stunning beauty, support for local communities, irrigation for hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural lands, and much more

For  millennia, the Clark Fork watershed has been a source of cultural, spiritual, and physical sustenance for Native American tribes. Traditional place names across the watershed used by the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai people, through whose ancestral lands the Clark Fork flows, reflect the central importance of the fish, wildlife, and plants that the river and its tributaries provide. (Learn more.)

In the early 1800s, the Lewis and Clark expedition explored much of the Clark Fork Basin, and the Clark Fork River was ultimately named for Captain William Clark.

In the 1860s, the Montana gold rush brought dramatic change to the watershed, including large-scale and widespread mining operations, an influx of settlers, the establishment of extensive road and rail systems, and explosive growth in logging and agricultural enterprises to support mining towns and Montana's quickly-growing population. By 1900, Butte, Montana was the largest city in the West, thanks to the mining boom.

But decades of heavy industrial use on this hard-working river took a toll. Mining pollution, along with logging, smelting, agricultural  production (and associated extensive irrigation systems), and development, had far-reaching impacts on the watershed. In 1908 a massive flood transported millions of cubic yards of mine waste from the headwaters near Butte downstream 120 miles to Milltown Dam near Missoula. This event, and smaller floods after it, left behind some 1,500 acres of highly contaminated floodplain and riverbank, a significant portion of which remains polluted to this day. (See a watershed history timeline here.)

After decades of community advocacy, the Clark Fork - from its headwaters to its confluence with the Blackfoot River near Missoula - was designated as a complex of federal Superfund sites, becoming the largest Superfund complex in the country. This designation and subsequent legal settlements opened the door for cleanup and provided funding for both reclamation (cleanup) and restoration of the river corridor. Cleanup efforts began at Milltown Dam in 2005 and in the Upper Clark Fork in 2010. (Learn more)

Cleanup and revitalization of the Clark Fork watershed is one of largest and most complex river restoration efforts in the world. Progress to date includes cleanup and removal of Milltown Dam; restoration of  Silver Bow Creek; remediation of several reaches of the Upper Clark Fork corridor; restoration of aquatic and terrestrial resources (including in tributaries) in the Upper Clark Fork basin; fish barrier removal, bank stabilization, and flow and habitat enhancement in the mainstem river and on numerous tributaries; development of research, education, and monitoring programs, and more.

But this decades-long effort is far from over, and while we have seen notable successes, overall results have been mixed. The 2023 Strategic Plan estimates that cleanup and restoration will not be completed until 2038, and if past is prologue, there's a good chance it could take longer. The budget is also a major concern:  while only 7 of 22 phases of the Upper Clark Fork cleanup have been completed (as of the Oct. 2023 release date of the Strategic Plan), 50% of the settlement funds have already been spent. Further, fish numbers have plummeted in cleaned up areas of the river (and other areas) for reasons no one yet understands. And after a failed "waste-in-place" treatment in the 1990s, soils contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals have been re-exposed in Arrowstone Park in Deer Lodge, an area with high public use, including by children. This serious human health risk must be a cleanup priority, but requires more money, time, and remediation efforts than originally anticipated.

Meanwhile, hotter, drier, and longer summers are causing chronic extreme low flows and high water temperatures in the basin. These conditions stress a recovering and still highly compromised river - as well as the people, fish, and wildlife that depend on it - at the same time that agricultural, recreational, and community demands on the river are rising.

As cleanup and restoration continue, the involvement and input of local communities is essential. The mission of CFRTAC is to help you be part of this effort, so that cleanup and restoration plans, processes, and priorities result in the best possible outcomes for the river and local communities.