Thought all of you might like to hear this news. Cook City, Montana, of course, is one of fly fishing’s great destinations, offing easy access to the Lamar River, plus Soda Butte Creek, Slough Creek, Trout Lake and many other solid trout waters. I haven’t been to that area for a few years but I used to fish it a lot and the native cutthroats were at once challenging and solid. If you get a chance this coming summer, hit Soda Butte and the rest of them and return to Cook City in the evenings for true western flavor and big steaks. Here’s the story from the Billings Gazette.
Huge strides were made this summer to clean up Soda Butte Creek, once considered the most polluted stream to enter Yellowstone National Park.
Despite the challenges of working in a wet meadow in a high mountain valley, reclamation of the McLaren Mill tailings site just east of Cooke City is a year ahead of schedule and under budget in its first year of moving dirt.
“The thing that makes the job fast is it was dry this year,” said Tom Henderson, of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s Remediation Division.
The $20 million project is the most expensive remediation work the state has ever … Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/yellowstone-river-tributary-benefitting-from-m-project/article_342076a4-58db-5a54-b330-f0c5931625b9.html#ixzz2910S2JFr
I don’t recall the full story, but it was my understanding that the dead zone created by the mine was keeping stocked Brookies from moving downstream into the the rest of the Lamar watershed. It makes me wonder sometimes if there are too many moving parts in our efforts to fix things. We’re never going to fix everything. As some point we’re just going to have to settle for the new normal and move forward.