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Water (and waste) run downhill – and our rivers pay the price – Daily Montanan [1]

['More From Author', 'October', 'George Ochenski']

Date: 2023-10-13  

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know water — and rivers — run downhill. That would be just fine if all we still got from our majestic snow-capped mountains was some of the cleanest water on the planet. But that’s not the case because water picks up and carries downhill all the vast variety of pollutants modern civilization so callously exudes.

The gut-wrenching email from an old friend hit the inbox with the pictures of what was once a gin-clear stretch of the Gallatin now filled with weeds. Gone was the healthy population of trout that had been there on the same family land for nearly a century. Where, they asked, had the trout gone? Why were all the weeds there when it had always been a free-stone riverbed? And finally, who should we write and what can we do about it?

The sad fact is the weeds are there thanks to the enormous amount of nutrients, poorly treated wastewater, sediment, and runoff flowing into the Gallatin River from Big Sky, the Yellowstone Club, Spanish Peaks, Moonlight Basin and the vastly over-developed subdivisions stuffed into one tiny drainage and clogging the river’s once nearly-empty banks. It’s the same pollution that has turned the once-pristine Gallatin River neon green every summer now — in a river you could once drink from while casting a fly on it’s world-famous waters.

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/10/13/water-and-waste-run-downhill-and-our-rivers-pay-the-price/

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