Saving Splashy Scenery Groups Work To Protect Montana’S Spectacular Alberton Gorge

A four-way land sale and exchange is in the making to preserve the purple cliffs and other river features along the Clark Fork River’s Alberton Gorge.

The U.S. Forest Service, Montana Power Co., River Network and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks are working to protect the7-mile stretch of river from development.

More than 30,000 kayakers and rafters float each year through the gorge, which parallel’s Interstate 90 west of Alberton, Mont.

Say the words “Fang” and “Tumbleweed,” and kayakers will respond: “The Gorge.”

“For a number of years as I floated down the gorge, I would look up at the banks and imagine them lined with cabins and trophy homes,” said Peter Dayton, an attorney and board member of the Missoula Whitewater Association. “I thought, we’ve got to do something so there aren’t porches hanging out over the bank of the river.”

So Dayton and others started researching the land ownership and found happily, Dayton said that much of the river frontage was owned by Montana Power Co.

“By working with Montana Power, we could really get something done,” he said. “We didn’t have to pick away at a half-mile here and a half-mile there. They had 7 miles of river frontage.”

The whitewater playground afforded by the gorge is regionally prominent, according to Dayton.

“There is not really an awful lot of whitewater in Montana, and most of it is runoff whitewater that’s good in the spring, but poops out by early July. The Alberton Gorge is actually best at low water. It’s great in the summer and fall. It never gets too low. There are always good play spots.”

The state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which would own and manage Alberton Gorge under the proposed land deal, used traffic counters and surveys to estimate recreational use of the river in recent years. In 1996, 35,000 people used the Cyr fishing access site, the main put-in for the whitewater section. In 1998, the number jumped to 38,000.

Of those users, 80 percent said they intended to go downriver by kayak or raft; 42 percent were accompanied by whitewater outfitters. The rest were on their own.

“So what you have, 30 or 40 minutes from Missoula, is one of the greatest whitewater rafting experiences you can have in western Montana,” said Lee Bastian, Montana’s regional state parks manager. “By comparison, the Blackfoot is a unique and beautiful river, but it doesn’t have the series of rapids that the Alberton Gorge has. It creates a lot of fun for a lot of people.”

The classification varies depending on the time of year, but at times the rapids in Alberton Gorge are Class 3s and 4s, whitewater that can require expert boat-handling skills.

Late last year, with grant money from American Whitewater and the Conservation Alliance, River Network paid $50,000 for an option on the 380 riverfront acres. The option gives the conservation group a year to complete purchase of Montana Power Co.’s land, valued at $1.1 million to $1.2 million.

River Network would buy the land, then would transfer it to the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks - which already manages the river and owns the fishing access sites at Cyr and Tarkio.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks would then transfer to the U.S. Forest Service some acreage - the exact numbers are yet to be determined - that it owns within national forests in Montana.

The Forest Service would then transfer land to the River Network, which the conservation group would sell to recover its investment.

“It would have been so easy for Montana Power to just sell the land and run,”Dayton said. “But they didn’t. They’re giving us time to put together a fairly complicated deal.”

The result, said Bastian, “is that we’re going to be able to protect a wild river and wild environment just off the interstate highway, not much more than a half hour from Missoula. That’s rare.”