America 250th: Celebrating the beauty and connection of the Clark Fork River

"I feel like there's an innateness in rivers that, we can kind of feel the movement there," says Kevin Niehaus, a teaching naturalist with the Montana Natural History Center. "We see the change as it happens. We take note of it, the echoing impact."

"These consultants from out of town kept saying that we were a mountain town, and I think we finally all came to reality that we're not," laughs Molly Stockdale, the Executive Director of Traveler's Rest Connection. "I mean, we are a mountain town-ish, but we're really a river town, right?"

You know what they are talking about, right? I know you can feel it deep in your own souls, just thinking about the river itself. There is something different about this water, in this place. There are a lot of special rivers in the Treasure State. But there is no connection, anywhere in Big Sky Country, like the connection between Missoula, Montana, and the powerful Clark Fork.

"I think people feel themselves when they are here," Chaffin says. "They feel more human than they do than other parts of their lives."

Chaffin is in charge of the Clark Fork Coalition, a Missoula-based non-profit who has been enjoying and protecting the Clark Fork for decades.

"I love that we get to get up every morning and go to work on behalf of the river," Chaffin says. "It's really that simple. I get to get up and go to work for the river. That's a privilege that I take very seriously."

The group uses science-based advocacy policy to keep the waters clean and flowing, not just for the floaters and rafters, but for the farmers, the ranchers, and the entire animal and plant ecosystems that rely on the cold waters for life.

The Clark Fork watershed itself has been here for millennia. Native peoples for thousands of years have been traversing the waterways. It's not a little stream; it's mighty, it's powerful. It's the largest river in the state of Montana by water volume. You could drop a rubber duck in the headwaters in Butte, America, and eventually, that duck would be able to see Idaho, Canada, Washington, and wave a wing to Portland, Oregon as it flows directly into the Pacific Ocean.

"This was an area where you had groups from the Bitterroot Valley, to up in the Flathead Valley, and even groups from Idaho, and parts of Washington, and Oregon, because the river could provide," Niehaus says.

Niehaus is a man who can talk water, and he teaches about the beauty of Big Sky Country to our youngest Montanans. He is a naturalist with the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula, and listening to him wax poetic about the river is enjoyable.

"Think of how much your world is different and changed if it's constantly in motion," Niehaus says. "If it ebbs and flows across the seasons, ice storms moving through high waters, low waters, bug hatches, birds coming through it is this fascinatingly strange and complicated ever-going ecosystem. Spaced rivers are almost more cycles of time, and I just think that's really neat as something to think about and explore."

Explore... this river has a rich and deep history of that as well. Maybe the most famous exploration in the 250 year history of our country happened right through this area of Montana. Meriweather Lewis and the river's namesake, William Clark, put the Clark Fork on the literal modern map.

"So Traveler's Rest State Park is the only archeological verified campsite of the Lewis and Clark expedition," says Stockdale. "That means, of all the places they camp, this is the only place that we found confirmed archeological evidence that they were here, which makes us pretty special."

Stockdale is the executive director of Traveler's Rest Connection, the non-profit that helps maintain and teach out the area of land 10 miles south of Missoula, called Traveler's Rest State Park. It's the place where the Corps of Discovery split their team on the way back east through Montana.

"It was literally a journey of exploration," Stockdale laughs. "So they are just out here learning as much as they can about everything. And that includes, you know, talk to the locals. If you're visiting a new city, you're going to talk to the locals. I don't want to say sacred ground because it's not sacred, but it's just a very special place where you can encounter history as it happened, but also history as we're making it today."

Lewis and Clark historian and noted, "Clarkie", Scott Sproull, agreed that Traveler's Rest is a special place.

"In a place like this where I can't see houses or anything, you just feel like you're a part of what might have happened 200 and some years ago," Sproull says. "So it's really fun to get out on the trail and see the, the actual spots"

Like Star Trek fans nicknaming themselves "Trekkies", Sproull and his group are called "Clarkies", and they enjoy bringing that history to life for the people of Montana.

"Lewis follows today's Mullan Road and Broadway street to Hellgate Canyon, and he mentions, the Rattlesnake Creek," Sproull says. "There's a bronze sign on the north side on the bridge on Broadway in Rattlesnake that says Lewis camped here on July 4th, 1806. He did not. When you get into the weeds and you become a Clarkie, you find that they didn't know a lot of stuff 150 years ago that we know now."

"A lot of good poets and authors have tried to put it into words," smiles Chaffin. "My vision for the Clark Fork River is one where the river flows clean, clear and abundant. It mirrors the natural cycles of flood and drought that this watershed has known for millennia. And that people can live here in harmony."

"In an era now where it's not dependent that we build right on a river for our own societies to work, I feel like we're always going to be drawn to it just because it's what we get drawn to," says Niehaus. "It's the lifeblood for a reason."

150 years ago, 1000 years ago, or even today, there is a humanity that comes from places like the Clark Fork River, as it runs through the center of our civilization. It's ever present, always there.