Every morning before opening the fly shop in Gardiner, Montana out of which I guide, I walk down to the Highway 89 bridge to check the Yellowstone River.  From the bridge I can look upstream most of a mile, into Yellowstone Park.  I note many things: water level, clarity, and on days when the Yellowstone is dirty, the particular shade of the sediment --each major tributary has its own.  All of these variables tell me something different about fishing conditions and even weather conditions upstream, helping me decide where in the Yellowstone Park area to take my clients.

     If my glance off the bridge is discouraging, the Yellowstone’s small tributaries can be expected to provide some fishable water, even if they are raging with snowmelt themselves, since they almost always run clear.  Often, the steep creeks that tumble down from the Absaroka Mountains north of the Park or from the Park’s central plateau hit the Yellowstone with enough force that they make the big river run clear for a hundred yards or more downstream of their mouths, providing a short stretch of water that’s usually full of fish.  One creek that doesn’t quite match this pattern is Bear Creek.

     Bear is the first tributary to enter the Yellowstone outside of the Park, in the half mile where the river dips north into Montana before reentering Yellowstone for another mile and a half.  It’s a big creek, and the run at its confluence with the Yellowstone can be good.  Much of the time, however, on warm days in June when the snowpack is melting fast, or after thunderstorms, Bear Creek runs muddy.

       This seems a conundrum at first.  Blacktail Creek, which enters the Yellowstone a few miles upstream of Bear Creek on the south side of the river, is among the first creeks in the northern part of the Park to clear.  Tower Creek, a stream about the size of Bear that enters the Yellowstone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, runs so hard in the spring that it knocks boulders the size of cars from their perches, but I’ve never seen it run any dirtier than gray-green.

      The answer to this conundrum is the usual explanation for why Western rivers run muddy.  From the 1950s until the 1970s, Bear Creek’s upper watershed was logged.  Since this area is at fairly high elevation, with steep, loose slopes, second-growth timber has yet to grow thickly enough to stabilize the drainage.  So Bear Creek gets dirty, and the threatened Yellowstone Cutthroat that run up under cover of high water do not spawn quite so successfully as they might due to the silt.

       All of this would not matter much in the long run, if the watershed were given more time to recover.  Unfortunately, the upper Bear Creek watershed has no more time.  In an effort to help pay for a land swap elsewhere in the area, the Forest Service has agreed to sell 2.1 million board-feet of timber from the watersheds of two of Bear Creek’s tributaries, Eagle and Darroch Creeks.  These areas were among those logged previously, so in order to meet the board-feet targets, most of the logs will come from old-growth leave strips that remain from prior rounds of cutting. 

         None of this is really news.  The cut has been opposed by the local Bear Creek Council, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and others since 1999, on the grounds that it will damage prime grizzly habitat and cutthroat spawning grounds.  After years of going back and forth in the courts, the 9th Circuit recently handed down a ruling which removes the last barrier to the logging plan.  In the words of one Bear Creek Council member, there "isn't anywhere to go from here except to make sure the Forest Service makes the loggers adhere to the terms of the sale."

     So the logging plan will go forward.  I expect to see more Bear Creek mud when I look at the Yellowstone off the bridge, and the creek will be an even less viable option when the big river is running dirty.  I can't fault the 9th Circuit for their decision, though, since they cannot look at the watershed itself, but only the stacks of paperwork, which are not as clear as Bear Creek would be if its watershed were truly ready to be logged again.