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  • Steve Jenkins on April 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: trout   

    It’s a simple fact of life across the rural West, as it is in Montana’s mountain-ringed Big Hole River Valley. Flooding river bottoms to grow hay sustains the economy but means less water in the river for the prized wild trout population.

    The competition for water is not new, but it is intensifying as the climate here gets warmer and drier. The biggest worry for trout is that smaller streams will simply run dry in late summer and temperatures in the remaining pools will exceed lethal levels.

    By all accounts, these kinds of changes in the West’s celebrated trout fisheries are happening quickly — faster, experts say, than in other parts of the country. A new report by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, based on research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows temperatures in the West the last five years increased by 1.7 percent, compared with 1 percent elsewhere, and the changes are expected to accelerate.

    [Read](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/science/earth/01trout.html?ex=1365048000&en=9af4011290431f84&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss “Read the Article”) (New York Times)

     
  • Steve Jenkins on April 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , trout   

    Every evening, a 45-car train rumbles away from the Clark Fork River, loaded not with copper, gold or silver ore, but with the toxic legacy of more than a century of mining: tons of contaminated mud from behind an old dam.

    Workers are removing 2.2 million cubic yards of the muck — and dismantling the 101-year-old Milltown Dam — in a breathtakingly scenic part of Montana trout-fishing country.

    For decades, metals released into the river by mining and ore-processing in the Butte area collected downstream in the sediment behind the hydroelectric dam, where the toxins are now threatening fish and polluting drinking water in the ground below.

    The dam is part of a big swath of southwestern Montana that has been designated the nation’s largest Superfund cleanup site.

    [Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23696251/ “Read the Article”) (AP via MSNBC)

     
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