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Glacier Park and Flathead Forest restart management planning for Three Forks of the Flathead River — finally

Environmental Issues, News, ,

From the official joint press release . . .

Joint Release: New Project Leader Joins the Comprehensive River Management Planning Effort for the Three Forks of the Flathead Wild and Scenic River

North Fork of the Flathead River - ©Mark LaRowe
North Fork of the Flathead River – ©Mark LaRowe

Release Date: 

Kalispell, MT, May 6, 2024 — The Flathead National Forest and Glacier National Park are working together to reengage in the Comprehensive River Management Plan (CRMP) for the three forks of the Flathead River. “We are bringing on a new project leader who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in Wild and Scenic River planning” says Rob Davies, Hungry Horse-Glacier District Ranger. “Our aim is a cohesive interdisciplinary, interagency team with aligned vision, working together on a plan for all the three forks, now and going into the future”. Our new team leader has experience with river management plans from across the nation and joins us from the U.S. Forest Service Washington Office’s Wilderness, Wild and Scenic Rivers Program.

The Flathead National Forest began the planning effort in 2018 and released a proposed action in 2019, which included public scoping and a series of public meetings. While plan development experienced periods of delay in 2020 and again in 2023, the Flathead National Forest and Glacier National Park continued to analyze public input from the 2019 public engagement efforts and work towards drafting a plan for the next phase of public participation. Continue reading Glacier Park and Flathead Forest restart management planning for Three Forks of the Flathead River — finally →

Roads lawsuit brings split decision

Environmental Issues, News
Grizzly Bear - Montana FWP
Grizzly Bear – Montana FWP

A more nuanced discussion of the lawsuit over some road provisions in the Flathead Forest Plan . . .

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathleen DeSoto March 12 recommended that two local environmental groups partially prevail in their claims against the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over road management on the Flathead National Forest.

The recommendations, if they hold, could drastically alter the way the Forest Service manages closed roads in the future.

Continue reading . . .

Federal court strikes down portions of Flathead National Forest plan

Environmental Issues, News,
Grizzly bear in early fall - Montana FWP
Grizzly bear in early fall – Montana FWP

Oops! This one almost slipped past me this week . . .

A federal court magistrate has found that the Flathead National Forest has failed to consider the impacts of new road-building projects on grizzly bears and bull trout, saying the United States Forest Service is ignoring science in order to arrive at its approval for the project which has been contested since 2018.

Magistrate Kathleen DeSoto said that, like a previous court decision, the Flathead National Forest ignored roads that had been “decommissioned” but still exist and allow for motorized vehicle travel, which is technically illegal, but the USFS acknowledges happens. In the Forest Service’s 2009 plan, officials called for removing many of those roads, but opted to “decommission” them by blocking them, which severely curbed, but didn’t eliminate their use.

Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan sued the Forest Service, saying that it couldn’t ignore the roads in its calculations and plans, which said that in 2009 the federal agency agreed that any new project could not add to motorized vehicle use in the forest. DeSoto found that even though those roads were decommissioned, they were still usable, and should have been considered and addressed in the plans. Doing that, the citizens’ groups argued, would then have rendered the Forest Service’s plan in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

Continue reading . . .

Alert: Ask the EPA to perform a full cleanup of the CFAC Superfund site

Action Alerts, Environmental Issues,

Dear friends of the North Fork,

Alongside many Flathead conservation groups, we are asking our supporters and members to please sign the EPA petition to get CFAC and the main stem of the Flathead river cleaned up once and for all! From headwaters to main waters, you can be a part of the bigger, cleaner picture. There’s more work to come, but for now, you can learn more and sign your name to the petition by visiting the Coalition for a Clean CFAC website.

You can also read a short summary of the situation below.

Flannery Freund
NFPA President

 

Summary written by Peter Metcalf; lightly edited here…

We are reaching out to you about the cleanup of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Plant Superfund site in hope you may be concerned and willing to help. We are part of a growing group of concerned citizens who are pressing for a complete cleanup of the approximately 1.2 million cubic yards of contaminants that remain on site. It’s a doozy of nasty chemicals, including cyanide, fluoride, arsenic and selenium. The proposed “cleanup” plan would leave all this waste on site where it can potentially leach into nearby drinking water wells or the Flathead river. Rather than restored or redeveloped, the 960-acre site would be mostly off limits to future human uses. For years the local citizens and the elected leaders have consistently asked for the waste to be removed. But CFAC did not analyze this option during the feasibility study. The company simply dismissed it as too costly and too disruptive to local communities to truck the waste and too costly. (They conveniently glossed over the fact that for nearly 20 years they removed toxic waste by the existing rail line to a hazardous waste landfill out of state.

We are at a critical juncture. The EPA is reviewing the proposed plan and expects to issue a decision this spring. We are trying to get the EPA to stop their decision making process and require a full cost-benefit analysis be conducted before issuing a final plan. We are also trying to organize a community visioning process to help determine the future uses of the site. So how can you help?

  1. Please sign the petition to the EPA on our Coalition’s website.
  2. Please share the petition with others. You can do so by forwarding the website link or by passing along the flyer and paper petition to collect signatures (linked below). We need as many signatures as possible.
  3. Contact our elected officials (especially the county commissioners) and ask them to tell the EPA they do not support the proposed waste-in-place plan.

Flyer & petition document links:
Coalition for a Clean CFAC flyer
Petition to the EPA

 

 

2024 Wilderness Speaker Series kicks off Feb 21st

News

The Flathead Valley Community College will host the annual Wilderness Speaker Series in partnership with three local environmental non-profit organizations. The series is presented by the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation, the Northwest Montana Lookout Association, and the Flathead-Kootenai Chapter of Wild Montana, with support from the Natural Resources Conservation & Management program at FVCC.

The series will be held on the 3rd Wednesdays of February, March and April in the Large Community Room (#139) at FVCC’s Art and Technology Building from 7:00-8:15 PM. The events are free of charge.

On Wednesday, February 21st local historian and lookout Mark Hufstetler is the featured speaker. As a professional historian who spends his summers on Baptiste Lookout on the Flathead National Forest, Mark will share his unique perspective and take a look at the lives of the men and women who have staffed these towers over the generations – a unique shared experience that is remarkably little-changed today.

The heartbeat of wild places

Environmental Issues, Photos & Images, Science
Mountain Lion - US Forest Service
Mountain Lion – US Forest Service

A fascinating article on mountain lions with a North Fork focus and some excellent photos . . .

Populations of big cats are declining globally because of habitat loss and poaching, but mountain lion numbers are increasing. They are the most successful large cats in the Americas and live from the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in South America, north to Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Jim Williams, author, biologist and former regional director of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, says Montana has two to four times as many lions as wolves on the landscape. More mountain lions live in Glacier National Park than Yellowstone proper, Williams says, due to the high white-tailed deer population in Glacier, and wolf packs in Yellowstone have displaced mountain lions from the high, open plains to the northern region of the park where deep canyons and steep slopes are prevalent. “There are 4.9 resident adults per 100 square kilometers in Glacier,” he said. “That’s the highest we’ve detected in Montana.”

The story below happened in Glacier, but could have easily occurred in Greater Yellowstone or anywhere carnivores face off in conflict.

Continue reading . . .

Feds deny petition to restore wolf protections in northern Rockies

Environmental Issues, News,
Gray wolf - John and Karen Hollingsworth, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Gray wolf – John and Karen Hollingsworth, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Federal wildlife managers denied a petition to restore ESA protections to the gray wolf population in the northern Rockies . . .

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) on Friday denied a listing petition from an alliance of more than 70 conservation groups seeking to restore Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections to gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains. Although federal wildlife managers framed the decision as following “a path to support a long-term and durable approach to the conservation of gray wolves,” and pledged to adopt a first-of-its-kind National Recovery Plan, the conservation groups said they were considering a legal challenge.

Gray wolves are still listed under the ESA as endangered in 44 states, and are considered threatened in Minnesota; however, in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and portions of eastern Oregon and Washington, the wolves are managed under state jurisdiction, with their respective legislatures passing laws allowing wolf harvests, while setting quotas and regulations to manage the populations.

Although the FWS decision doesn’t change existing policy, it signals the latest turn in a decades-old debate over state and federal management of wolves in the West, as well as how to quantify the species’ recovery following their delisting in places like Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

Continue reading . . .

Chrisman family completes 310 acre conservation easement on North Fork

Environmental Issues, News,

Posted to Facebook on February 1, 2024 . . .

Montana Land Reliance (MLR) announces a forested property near Glacier National Park will forever be protected from development. MLR has completed a conservation easement on a 310-acre property north of Polebridge owned by the Chrisman family. Funded by the MLR Jeff Shryer Fund and the Heart of the Rockies Initiative, the easement property is located less than a half mile from Glacier National Park and bordered by Flathead National Forest. The Chrisman property includes a small tributary of the North Fork River and contains a diverse ecosystem with varied upland timber and riparian wetland habitats.

Deer, elk, moose, black and grizzly bear, lynx, gray wolves, wolverine, and bald eagle will forever thrive on the property – including the grizzly pictured here, taken on the family’s game camera. Many thanks to the Chrisman’s and Heart of the Rockies Initiative for partnering with us!

Waste-in-place’ cleanup plan for CFAC Superfund site draws fire from advocacy group

Environmental Issues, News, , ,

A group of local residents are not happy about plans to handle pollution at the old CFAC Superfund site by treating and storing the toxic waste on-site rather than shipping it elsewhere . . .

A pair of Flathead County citizen advocacy groups have formed a coalition in response to the proposed cleanup plan at the site of the former Columbia Falls Aluminum Company (CFAC) along the Flathead River, where federal regulators have proposed containing hazardous wastes as part of their final remediation rather than shipping the toxic materials off-site.

The newly formed Coalition for a Clean CFAC is requesting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) “take a timeout to fairly re-evaluate the cost benefits of removing, not leaving, the toxic waste at CFAC,” which the EPA declared a Superfund site in 2016.

According to a press release announcing the formation of the new coalition, it represents two existing organizations, Citizens for a Better Flathead and the Columbia Falls-based Upper Flathead Neighborhood Association, as well as a “rapidly growing number of city and county residents throughout the Flathead including a number of former CFAC employees and other local organizations.”

Continue reading . . .

‘Return of the Grizzly’ film showing Jan 29th, 5:30pm!

Environmental Issues, News

Sierra Club and Save the Yellowstone Grizzly  is showing Return of the Grizzly around the region. It is scheduled to be shown at the O’Shaughnessy Center in Whitefish on Jan 29th at 5:30pm with a question and answer period to follow. This is a project spearheaded by Doug Peacock. NFPA is a co-sponsor of this presentation.

This powerful 37-minute documentary follows the path and challenges of the “explorer bear,” the pioneering young male grizzlies that come from small, isolated core populations. The grizzly bear needs to explore and pioneer new habitats to spread its gene pool, and its long journeys are increasingly driven–and hemmed in–by the ravages of climate change. Return of the Grizzly is premiering NOW at numerous theaters in the West.