Mode of travel makes a huge difference on a trip through Montana’s Deer Lodge Valley.
As you drive along Interstate 90 near the exit for Warm Springs, the east-side window view offers Silver Bow Creek meandering below a low berm. From the passenger seat of a Cessna 210 airplane, you see that berm conceals a toxic-waste treatment pond stretching three and a half miles along the freeway.
The settling pond is part of a federal Superfund project that’s been grinding away since 2004, after court battles that began decades before that. The work aims to repair a mine-tailings disaster from the start of the 20th century.
After an aerial tour arranged by the Clark Fork Coalition and EcoFlight in June, Montana Department of Environmental Quality Bureau Chief Katie Garcin-Forba joked that she’d “only been at this for 15 years.” In addition to meeting the challenges of a remarkably complex and damaged ecosystem, Garcin-Forba said the effort often suffered from “Superfund fatigue.”
“We’re now working with ranchers’ kids,” she said of the community participation in the Upper Clark Fork. “This work spans multiple generations. All the project managers in DEQ have childhood ties to Superfund cleanups. Everybody grew up with a Superfund in their backyard.”
The Upper Clark Fork project is now close to the halfway point on its to-do list. But some key measurements aren’t improving, such as the return of native vegetation at repaired sites. Some are actually getting worse, particularly the numbers of trout in the water. New tasks are getting added, such as a workplan to clean Deer Lodge’s city park of arsenic this winter. And the work remaining stretches to at least 2038, according to the Clark Fork River Technical Assistance Committee.
“It’s still a Frankenstein landscape,” Brian Chaffin, Clark Fork Coalition executive director, told Montana Free Press. “But nobody’s vision of restoring this is ever going to be pristine. That gives us some flexibility.”
Long Time Coming
Historically, the Clark Fork’s troubles started in 1908 when a catastrophic flood flushed millions of tons of toxic mine tailings 120 miles from Butte and Anaconda to Missoula. About 6 million cubic yards of that waste settled behind Milltown Dam, just east of Missoula. Lots more deposited along the river and formed barren zones known as “slickens.”
Bureaucratically, cleaning the Clark Fork got rolling in 1983, when the state of Montana sued the Atlantic Richfield Co. for damaging the watershed after arsenic and other toxins started showing up in Milltown’s drinking water. But the government had toxic waste on its radar three years prior, as pollution problems across the nation concentrated a political coalition demanding Congress find a solution.
That movement produced the federal Superfund program in 1980, and the Upper Clark Fork was one of its earliest projects. The law, officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, empowers the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to clean up hazardous waste sites and legally force responsible parties to help pay for the work. It is funded in part by a tax on chemical and petroleum industries. Currently, 1,343 sites are on the National Priority List of federal responses to toxic substances. Another 460 sites have been deleted from the list after cleanup efforts were completed. Montana has 19 Superfund projects in the works.
“We’ve got Smurfit, we’ve got Libby, we’ve got Butte,” EPA Region 8 Regional Administrator Cyrus Western said during a visit to a new water-quality project near Missoula on Aug. 24. Those were the three best known Superfund projects in the state; a former pulp mill on the banks of the Clark Fork River, a former asbestos mine that underpinned the Libby economy for decades and sickened or killed hundreds of residents, and the legacy of Butte’s pursuit of precious and critical minerals. In all its geologic and geographic complexity, the Butte Superfund project, which includes the infamous Berkeley Pit, is physically the nation’s largest, affecting 120 miles of watershed.
The Upper Clark Fork case stretched for years until 2004 when ARCO, Montana and the federal government agreed to a cleanup plan overseen by state and federal Superfund laws. ARCO paid $121 million to Montana for remediation and restoration of the river and surrounding environment. The company, now a subsidiary of British Petroleum, also committed to completing cleanup work on its own lands involving millions of dollars, but as noted in a 2014 settlement agreement, “settling defendants are reportedly contributing to the cost of this work under terms not disclosed to the government.”
Although ARCO and its corporate ancestor, the Anaconda Company, ceased mining operations in the 1980s, Montana Resources continues to dig for copper, molybdenum and other minerals in Butte’s “Richest Hill on Earth.” It currently processes 15.7 million tons of ore per year, employing more than 400 people. That modern operation, however, is not related to the historic mining disaster spawning the Superfund designation.
Milltown Dam was demolished in 2012 after 3.3 million tons of mine sediment was removed and either hauled back to depositories by Anaconda or capped and sealed on site. Repair work on the Upper Clark Fork started in 2010.
The Clark Fork River Superfund Site has three parts, known as “reaches.” This story concerns Reach A, a 43-mile-long portion of the river from its headwaters at Warm Springs to Garrison in Powell County. Reach B stretches from Garrison to Drummond, while Reach C extends downstream to the former Milltown Dam and the rebuilt confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers.
Even during the wetter end of spring in June, the aerial view of the river reveals how little water runs through the Deer Lodge Valley. The 43 miles of the Clark Fork’s mainstem show as an ox-bowed ribbon of green in otherwise golden-brown grasslands. It’s fed by 800 miles of streams and creeks, but few of those push enough water to green up their own channels. Another 200 miles of irrigation ditches and pipes divert much of the flow to sprinklers supporting hay fields.
“It would be different if this was a better-connected stream, but there’s just not enough water,” Chaffin said. “The stream needs to be able to be resilient to threats. To be cool enough to sustain trout, you need flows around 65 degrees, or you need to be connected enough to have refuges of cool water. You need to have big enough spring runoffs to scour the algae off and connect habitat.”
Rebuilding the River
Over the past 16 years, an alphabet soup of agencies have been rearranging the Upper Clark Fork. The website for the Clark Fork River Technical Assistance Committee (CFRTAC) mentions the state DEQ and Natural Resource Damage Program (NRDP) working on the Upper Clark Fork (UFC) in coordination with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Operable Unit (OU) responding to the 2004 Record of Decision (ROD).
CFRTAC’s June 2026 newsletter acknowledges some major challenges to the work. Attempts to reconstruct floodplains after toxic waste removal in the early phases used coconut-fiber “coir logs,” 10-inch-thick rope strands, to reinforce tall riverbanks. While that protected the newly cleaned areas from high-water runoff, it also slowed the return of native plant communities. And initial vegetation chosen for replanting turned out to be expensive, weedy and too fragile to survive. The result: river sections with little or no plant life and poor fish habitat.
Subsequent phases got rid of the coir logs in favor of live-willow cuttings, root wads and shorter bank heights, allowing for more flooding at the risk of mobilizing some of the remaining toxic waste. The program’s 2023 strategic plan observed that it wouldn’t have enough money to continue in the same format for the remaining 13 phases.
“The biggest change has been to reduce the amount of contamination being removed from the floodplain from a conservative buffer zone to a narrower buffer that is less conservative but still protective,” the newsletter stated. “Budget constraints also limit the extent to which preferred bank treatments, revegetation strategies, and wetland designs can be applied.”
One thing that can’t be seen from either a car or airplane is fish. They’re hard to find from a boat as well, a source of deep concern and dissatisfaction for the Upper Clark Fork overseers. Revitalizing a struggling trout fishery to join the ranks of blue-ribbon angling destinations like nearby Rock Creek and the Blackfoot River was a popular goal of the recovery project. Instead, fish numbers tumbled.
“All signs are pointing to ‘things should be getting better,’” said NRDP project manager Brian Bartkowiak. “But there’s something happening between when [baby trout] come out of the gravel and when they get to the size we can measure. Maybe it’s death by a thousand cuts. Maybe they really did like copper. But if the canary is dead, we need to know what is going on.”
Those treatment ponds behind the berm above Silver Bow Creek helped improve water quality enough to support a notable population of transplanted brown trout in the 1980s. And the non-native newcomers have a relatively high tolerance for metal contamination in the water, contributing to 2,500 fish per mile in 2003. But shortly after the upper headwaters remediation work began, the numbers dropped to 200 per mile in 2015, which has become the multiyear average.
“Fish is a good indicator,” Bartkowiak said, “but we’re trying to restore all the lost resources and services in the Upper Clark Fork.”
Dan McQueary is one local with deep concerns about how the cleanup has impacted trout. The fishery was doing well and the river always had fish, he maintained, even when it was highly polluted.
“I think they made some mistakes the way they cleaned up the river,” said McQueary, the removal of too much vegetation and cover from the riverbanks, leaving few shady spots for fish to hide. “I used to love to fly fish. Now, all of a sudden we changed one thing and now the fish are gone. They’ll be back but it’s going to take quite a while.”
John Hollenbeck is another lifelong rancher and one of the first in the area to start working with state agencies and environmental groups to implement watershed restoration projects on his land. These included things like screens to stop fish from getting caught in ditches and modernized headgates to improve the efficiency of irrigation diversions.
However, Hollenbeck said the Superfund process appeared unwilling to listen to ranchers or their ideas. “It just bothered the hell out of me that we’re going to spend almost a billion dollars to clean up the Clark Fork River and we’re going to do it … without the landowners,” he said. Hollenbeck told the agencies the landowners would be the ones left to sustain the improvements after the cleanup is complete, and therefore needed to play a major role in planning it.
Other problems evolved from low to high concern as public pressure changed. Deer Lodge’s Arrowstone Park was built along the Clark Fork in the 1990s, and soon showed high levels of arsenic in its soil. But the EPA initially classified it as industrial land, meaning it had to exceed 680 parts per million of arsenic to qualify for remediation. In August, after negotiations with Montana DEQ and local residents, EPA lowered that threshold to the residential level of 150 ppm and has begun work on a clean-up plan that will commence in early 2027.
“Arrowstone is finally getting a hard look,” Chaffin said. “Milltown got done, Butte got done, Anaconda got done, but for a lot of these other communities along the river — it was always ‘we’ll get there.’ This is a good acknowledgement that we’re paying attention. It’s another important step in a long, long process.”
There are three main forces at play shaping the fate of the Deer Lodge Valley. The biggest is the water itself — how much flows in the Clark Fork and its tributaries; how much is allocated to agriculture, residential use and fisheries; and what affects its quality (shrinking spring runoffs, pulses of nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients, leftover mine contamination).
Next is the human community. The historical farmers and ranchers are consolidating, and many are nearing retirement age without clear succession plans. The profitability of agriculture has declined along with water supplies and a hotter climate. Tourism and recreation businesses show some growth opportunity, but they also depend on sub-par water conditions and marketing headwinds.
Third is the paradox of a restoration economy: the valley’s pollution problems have become part of its economic foundation. In addition to specific Superfund projects, the Upper Clark Fork benefits from the Columbia Basin Water Transaction Program. This Bonneville Power Administration mainly deals with restoration of salmon and steelhead habitat damaged by hydroelectric dams in Washington and Idaho. But the Clark Fork is a distant cousin in that watershed, and so receives some financial assistance for fish improvements.
Although President Donald Trump’s sweeping changes to the EPA have canceled or depleted many Superfund projects, the Upper Clark Fork and Butte-area work has been in place long enough to be unaffected.
“Some of the original phases look like scorched earth,” Chaffin said. “They do not look like the original riverbank. That’s changing in the new phases. There’s always an opportunity to do more or do better.”
Joshua Pike contributed to this story as part of his master’s degree research in environmental journalism at the University of Montana.
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