Change & Growth

As you’ve probably heard by now, 2025 is to be a year of transition and closure for BHRF.

After more than three decades of dedicated work on behalf of the Big Hole River, BHRF is sunsetting as its own entity and our program (along with me as Director) will be moving under the umbrella of Save Wild Trout (SWT); a move driven by the need to expand our water quality monitoring model to all four rivers of the Jefferson Basin: the Big Hole, Beaverhead, Ruby, and Jefferson.

Why this transition?

As a single-employee organization (with several wonderful volunteers), BHRF has done a lot with a little. Over the past 6 years we’ve established what is widely considered one of the best citizen-science monitoring programs in Montana. And, that far-sighted project and our diligence has borne fruit: we’ve identified persistent exceedances of scientific criteria demonstrating the presence of water quality problems in the river, justifying a petition to the state.

Now, we didn’t set out to prove impairment of water quality on the Big Hole and file a petition for designation with DEQ. Rather, like many of you we assumed that the river was relatively pristine and as a headwater stream, was deserving of additional protection in the form of designation as an Outstanding Resource Water. Outstanding Resource Waters (ORW) are surface waters that have exceptional water quality, ecological, and recreational values and warrant special protection. These designations are determined by the state and are intended to protect unique and special waters.

Unfortunately, once we began to document and evaluate water quality to that end, the results over the course of this project have shown that that’s just not the case.

Now, that certainly doesn’t change the fact that this place is an absolute gem. The Big Hole remains the crown jewel of the upper Missouri basin and worthy of your visit.

But, in order to properly protect this place (or any other), we can’t hide from what the data show. Monitoring is like a diagnostics check on your car…… you can choose to acknowledge what it uncovers, addressing an identified issue before it gets worse, or, you can pretend nothing’s wrong and keep driving with an oil leak until it falls apart on you.

photo: Joseph Scheller, MT Standard

The Big Hole is not alone in facing these challenges. So, the tools to identify, define, and address such problems should be applied not just in the Big Hole, but to its sister rivers in southwest Montana. And where they are being addressed, this would provide additional oomph to those efforts.

In conversations exploring what has been missing outside of the Big Hole, the question that consistently comes up is, “why isn’t anyone doing a program like BHRF’s on the Beaverhead? Why isn’t anyone consistently monitoring bugs on the other rivers?”. Several such efforts were imagined, even planned, but unable to get off the ground.

Among the primary threats in the Jefferson Basin is degraded water quality, defined by parameters directly tied to the health and viability of aquatic life (fisheries and macroinvertebrates). Causal relationships between temperature, nutrient pollution, and low dissolved oxygen levels are playing out in real-time, today. The proof is already before us: Montana FWP’s own fishery data shows troubling trends in wild trout populations, while our research demonstrates persistent exceedances of water quality thresholds and shifting macroinvertebrate communities, an issue widely suspected to be shared elsewhere in the Basin where these trout population issues persist.

Many of our state agencies simply lack baseline data. For example, but for our water quality monitoring program there would be no baseline for the Big Hole’s water quality health. Better data supports an informed public and informed government, provides clarity for informing & prioritizing restoration, which in turn increases shared accountability for the universal value of water and healthy rivers. That “better data” is needed for the entire Jefferson Basin.

But such an effort in the entire Basin will not magically occur at a larger scale, even as water supply demands, climate change, and evolving land use patterns accelerate.

Several other groups (Big Hole Watershed Committee, Montana Trout Unlimited, Western Rivers Conservancy, DNRC, NRCS) are already working with landowners on available remedies for low-flows such as volunteer put-back from irrigators, leasing in-stream rights, tributary restoration, addressing conifer encroachment, and exploring the viability of cloud seeding and managed aquifer recharge.  That’s important work that has to continue. So, while we commend and continue to support those efforts and thank participants, the angle we’ve chosen to build our project around - water quality (for which there are science-based thresholds and triggers for restoration actions) - strikes us as the best chance for us to have a quantifiable impact on protecting and improving water resources, because there are established standards for nutrients and dissolved oxygen to protect aquatic life.

It’s also the current data gap for many of these rivers….. no one else is working on that kind of regular, long-term monitoring. And it’s a glaring need.

We may not be able to create snow in the mountains, but the least we can do is ensure what water we do have is clean.

The BHRF program model has proven that citizen science can fill such data gaps. To accomplish the vision of George Grant and to do our part to ensure there exists data defining current conditions and long-term trends by which to safeguard waterway and fishery health, we saw an urgent need to scale our program up to a Basin level.

Conversations with guides, community members, biologists, professors, and others reflected the view that a water quality program at the Basin-scale, modeled after the BHRF program, represents a very logical “next step” of our work.

To counter the question about whether George Grant (founder of BHRF) would be “spinning in his grave” over this transition…….. after reading much of his writings (particularly his Grant's Riffle essays), I have to believe he’d agree with this trajectory. Saving wild trout and the rivers they call home was his core mission. And frankly, I think that he’d be more concerned over the state & future prospects of the river and fishery he loved than the perpetual existence of any single organization.

Water quality is not only absolutely necessary to support wild trout (among the other beneficial uses), but also an explicit policy mechanism by which we can work towards protecting the very rivers that Grant cared so much about. Our model provides a well-defined path to leverage science in support of proactive river management, highlighting the need for and importance of making water resource decisions based on the best-available data, and, addressing data gaps where they exist in order to do so.

Working with Dr. Kyle Flynn, the widely respected lead scientist at Save Wild Trout, I see an opportunity to make BHRF’s legacy be that of creating, and sharing, a model for science-based river management for the entirety of the Jefferson River Basin…. and along with it, the case for the effectiveness of citizen science to fill gaps in state efforts.

To me, it’s a source of pride that the utility of the program we’ve built is valuable enough to be needed elsewhere. 

Of course, not everyone will agree. And while the response to this transition has been overwhelmingly positive, I am sensitive to the sentimentality that exists for BHRF.

But our world and our watersheds are rapidly changing. Basing management decisions on the best available science isn’t just a lofty ideal, it’s absolutely critical.

Like in the Big Hole before our program, best-available science for water quality and bug life in the Jefferson Watershed has been lacking. We feel an obligation to take what we’ve learned and built in the Big Hole to a larger scale because we feel an obligation to ensuring the well-being of these rivers that support us and the fisheries we love.

I hope that this explanation helps clarify the need for and reasoning behind this change. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a heartfelt and genuine Thank You! to everyone who’s supported this work over the years.

Whether you’re a long-time BHRF supporter or just happened to stumble upon this article on Facebook, I hope that you’ll recognize the importance of water quality monitoring and consider supporting our expanded efforts to conduct it throughout the entire Jefferson Basin through Save Wild Trout moving forward.

- Brian Wheeler