Spring 2018
Montana Fly Fishing Magazine is the FREE digital magazine devoted to fly fishing in the great state of Montana.
Montana Fly Fishing Magazine is the FREE digital magazine devoted to fly fishing in the great state of Montana.
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Timing - August 2016:<br />
At the time of the initial fish-kill in August of 2016, I was living in Big<br />
Sky fulltime. There we had recently experienced what a river looks<br />
like only months earlier, in this case the Gallatin, when on April 2015,<br />
30-million-gallons of muddy wastewater spilled out of an effluent pond<br />
discoloring the river for over 50 miles. Information had materialized<br />
soon afterward amongst those in the conservation community about<br />
the potential for direct-discharge in the near future; so, my focus as a<br />
journalist was on effluent, capacity-issues, and treatment.<br />
Given that mindset while I was reading the news of the Yellowstone<br />
river-closure, I began to wonder if the fish-kill might be related to the<br />
upcoming 100 th Anniversary of Yellowstone National Park and the<br />
anticipated 1-million visitors?<br />
I asked myself a basic mathematical question, how could the small<br />
rural-facility designed for 1,800 local Gardiner residents be handling the<br />
volumes of raw wastewater being produced, by what had already been<br />
estimated to be an arriving 900K in tourists annually, over the previous<br />
year?<br />
I did some preliminary research online and realized the Gardiner plant<br />
was renovated in 2012, advertised as state of the art at the time, yet<br />
and it was designed for 600,000 annual visitors. The plant has not been<br />
expanded since that time, to adjust for the significant increase in tourism<br />
(+300K-400K).<br />
MONTANA FLYFISHING
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