Restoring Ninemile Creek: A Labor of Love and Time

The Clark Fork and its headwaters represent a duality of incredible fish habitat and miles of former mines and industrial sites. More than 20 years after it began, the restoration of Ninemile Creek west of Missoula has delivered promising results, and not just for the trout.  

This week, the commissioners met with Paul Parson, Montana restoration director at Trout Unlimited, to talk mining history, environmental stewardship and how TU is facilitating the clean up former mine sites across the West. 

• Clark Fork River projects
• Ninemile Valley abandoned mine restoration

Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:10] Well, welcome back to the agenda with your Missoula County Commissioners. I'm Commissioner Dave Strohmaier. I am joined today by my good friends and colleagues, Juanita Vero and Josh Slotnick. And also joining us is Paul Parson, Montana restoration director at Trout Unlimited. We're going to talk a little bit about stream restoration up the nine mile and maybe other topics also. And I should let the listeners know that this is our second try with this podcast. The last time we had Paul on the power went off, I believe. And so we are starting from scratch today. So welcome, Paul.

Paul Parson: [00:00:44] Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:46] So Paul, tell us about this restoration project up in the nine mile. I know that's a big deal. Like saying, hey, so what are you been doing for the last ten years of your life? But a lot of the folks who are listening to this don't know about this project. So if you were to run into somebody who didn't know about it. And you said, yeah, I'm working on a stream restoration project up in the nine mile. And then they said, well, what's going on? What would you say?

Paul Parson: [00:01:07] Well, I would tell them that this, this project and series of projects has been going on for over two decades in partnership with a lot of different agencies and landowners up there. And for those folks that aren't familiar with Nine Mile Valley, it's a it's a pretty amazing place just west of Missoula. It's a really unique valley. It was formerly agriculture and timber and a lot of mining back in the day.

Juanita Vero: [00:01:31] So what were folks mining?

Paul Parson: [00:01:32] Yeah, they were mining for gold and several different forms. And we can get into that a little more in depth in a little bit. But generally what Trout Unlimited has been working on up there is fixing a series of abandoned mines that have been left behind by the the folks that kind of tore the ground up to get to the gold started in the 1880s, 1870s.

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:55] So we said stream restoration. What's the relationship between a stream and a mine.

Paul Parson: [00:01:59] Yeah, a lot of these mines are actually right in the stream. 

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:02] Bottom in the stream?

Paul Parson: [00:02:03] Yeah. We had placer mining, which is akin to large scale panning for gold. So it's gold flakes, gold nuggets that exist in a river system or a floodplain. [00:02:14] And the nine mile is really unique in that it's former Lake Missoula. You know, the last ice age, there was water on top of the whole valley with glaciers and the mountains, and those glaciers would scour the tops of the mountains. Nine mile divide and reservation divide, or two mountain ranges that form the Nine Mile Valley. And as those glaciers worked, they would essentially scour out in a road gold out of the rock in those mountains, and that gold and rock would travel down as the glaciers melted into Lake Missoula. And so it would hit the surface of the lake and then settle out at the bottom of the lake. That lake bed is now about 20ft to 30ft below the existing forest floor in this floodplain area, which now is the Nine Mile Creek. And so historically, you know, starting with immigrants back in the 1870s, 1880s, I believe, you know, they were doing it by hand, digging down to that layer and trying to find that layer of gold. It's like a a unique layer of gold that sat on that lake bed. [00:03:16]

Dave Strohmaier: [00:03:16] So just to paint a picture for ourselves and our listeners of what one of these placer mining operations look like, I'm sure many folks have have seen sluice boxes or dredges. Well, it was clearly a more industrial scale than just some old timer out there with his burro and a gold pan.

Paul Parson: [00:03:39] Yeah. I mean, it started out that way. There were there were two cities up there at the turn of the century for the cities to two towns.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:46] Yeah. What were they.

Paul Parson: [00:03:47] Called? Old Town and Martina. Wow. And there was a US post office. You know, a lot of Chinese and Irish immigrant labor lived in those towns. And they had, you know, full blacksmiths and hotels, the whole nine. And so quite a few folks living up there in pretty harsh conditions and working by hand. That all changed once everything became mechanized.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:10] And that's where what era was it? Yeah. When was that?

Paul Parson: [00:04:14] Well, it was really, you know, in the 30s and 40s, we started to see mechanized equipment up there. And so the damage that we're fixing, mostly this placer mine damage was a lot of it was done in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:27] And but some of these, like I'm using air quotes to say berm because berm sounds so small. But these are like yeah, like mini mountain ranges that are. Yeah. You're having to address.

Josh Slotnick: [00:04:37] What did it look like when you guys began work?

Paul Parson: [00:04:40] When we began, we weren't fortunate enough yet to have three dimensional mapping like the LiDAR, which is a flown mapping system that gives you a really three dimensional view. It was all surveyed by hand, and so the extent of the damage wasn't quite known. I mean, we had aerial imagery, but it was all covered in trees. Trees had grown.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:02] Fully mature trees like.

Paul Parson: [00:05:03] Mature trees.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:04] Wild 50.

Paul Parson: [00:05:05] Year old.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:06] Spruce.

Paul Parson: [00:05:06] And larch and lodgepole came right back in. On top of these piles.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:12] And again, piles makes it sound like they're so, like discreet or small. It's. Yeah, I can't even I don't have the words to describe how to describe it. This is this is just the audacity of this project or the damage. And then the belief that, my God, that you could actually fix it is so very ambitious.

Josh Slotnick: [00:05:31] So we went out there to visit, and I remember walking over an area that had you guys had not hit yet in terms of repair, and then visiting an area that had been completely redone with this new winding of stream. When we were walking through, walking over the ground that you hadn't hit yet, it looked to me as if like a giant claw had hit the ground and then dragged straight across so you'd had a hill and a valley and a hill and a valley and a hill and a valley, and they were maybe 20, 25ft up. 20, 25ft down.

Paul Parson: [00:06:04] Exactly that depth that you're describing, that 2020 five feet, sometimes 30ft, sometimes 40ft really correlates directly with the depth at which that gold layer was. And so the miners would dig a forest floor or a floodplain 30ft down, and then they would hit that layer, and they would process that layer with sluice boxes and water and, and mine it with water.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:29] And then the earth they would dig up would that become this long pile? And then the gouge the valley is where they're digging.

Paul Parson: [00:06:35] Exactly. And so it was just left in long rows, valley, valley length. And so we're talking about a landscape that's roughly five miles long along the main stem of Nine Mile Creek. And anywhere from, you know, a quarter mile to a half mile wide. It was basically just that old river bottom. That old glacial river bottom is what was really targeted.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:56] So what does a restored landscape visually look like?

Paul Parson: [00:07:00] Yeah. So you know, that was that was a problem that my predecessor at Trout Unlimited, Rob Roberts, really did a lot of head scratching. So is it.

Josh Slotnick: [00:07:08] True to work for you? You have to have an alliterative combination.

Juanita Vero: [00:07:12] It's absolutely true.

Josh Slotnick: [00:07:14] It's like a glass ceiling. You just can't get past it. Yeah, exactly. I understand.

Paul Parson: [00:07:19] The John Johnson's of the world.

Juanita Vero: [00:07:20] Right.

Paul Parson: [00:07:21] Um, yeah. Yeah. So, Rob, prior to me coming to t u, I had actually worked for him as an engineer doing some survey and design work on these couple of these mine sites. And Rob was really visionary in saying, you know, a lot of people were like, well, let's just fix the erosion because I guess, to describe even further what was left behind after these, these big placer mine piles and big, huge pits were left in the landscape. A lot of times, I think the miners had moved the river to the side of the valley in a straight line.

Josh Slotnick: [00:07:50] Just just that phrase. The miners moved a river.

Paul Parson: [00:07:54] Yeah. No, they just dug a huge channel on the side, and I think they were using some of that to process. But then also it was just to get it out of the way so they could work in more of a dry environment, you know. And so what was left was these really, really, really straightened stream system bound by these old placer mine piles that are basically just cobbles and sand and really erosive. And I guess to talk about the problems of that. And before we get to the fix, when you have a stream that's, you know, it was probably a giant wetland complex up there 150 years ago filled with beaver and moose and, and, you know, there's cedar tree stumps that we find that are six foot in diameter. Wow. And those trees don't exist anymore. That environment doesn't exist anymore. And a lot of that is just the water table has dropped. If you have your river system that's 30ft below where it should be, the groundwater follows. And so that whole area is is dewatered the groundwater, the wetlands, everything are dried out. And so part of the process of what we're trying to do is figure out where that water surface was, and can we get it back up there before we even start thinking about, like, build a new river? We need to get the whole valley back up to the elevation that we think it.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:05] Was to build up the floor of the valley. Yeah. Yep.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:08] And, Paul, before we get into the maybe the meat of Josh's question as far as what sort of function and arrangement are we shooting for in terms of restoration out there on the ground, and what does that look like? Who who perceived this as a problem? Because, yeah, the folks who were creating the damage in the first place probably did not necessarily. Clearly they understood they were ripping up the landscape, but maybe did not understand that this is a big problem that someone else is going to have to address. Was it private property owners, the Forest Service who came to Trout Unlimited and said, we've got an issue here and we need help figuring out how to fix it?

Paul Parson: [00:09:47] Yeah, no, that's a great question. You know, I think that a lot of people still can walk those piles in areas that we haven't fixed yet and not understand that it's a completely messed up ecosystem because you see the water, you know, the creek, the fishing's okay, it's not great, it's okay. And you know, those those placer mine piles are completely covered in vegetation. And so it doesn't look too bad, especially if you're there in May or June. It's just green, green, green like the Nine Mile Valley is I guess, to answer your question, Dave, on who really, I think it was a really a big combination. And Ralph Thisted, an old rancher up there who passed away several years ago, was really a steward of the landscape. And he's a part owner. His family was part owners of some of this land. And I think, you know, he he told me a story. I would visit with him every once in a while, which was a real treat to be able to sit down with Ralph and listen to stories. But he told me a story of when he went off to World War Two, and then he came back and a lot of that area had been mined, and he told me that he actually just cried because he couldn't believe the devastation that had happened while he was gone. You know, he ranched there his whole life, and so he understood that it wasn't right. And there was a lot of folks that really pushed for that. But one of the main advocates was the Forest Service understanding the fisheries biologists and hydrologists understanding that we're getting a lot of sediment in this fishery isn't what it could be, but it's all that sediment input is actually affecting landowners downstream. And we have pretty unbalanced, unhealthy system.

Juanita Vero: [00:11:16] And so why couldn't the Forest Service here's a plug for TU. Like why TU? Why or why? Why does Trout Unlimited come in to save the day? Yeah. Why is Trout Unlimited the vehicle I asked that often.

Paul Parson: [00:11:27] Like why is there a nonprofit cleaning up abandoned mines across the West? Um, I guess the simple answer is no one else is doing it. It takes a lot of coordination and collaboration, and that's something I think that Trout Unlimited is really good at, is we can pull together a lot of different resources and get everyone pulling in one direction, and that's kind of what it takes on these because, you know, I think we've had over ten funders, these ten major funders on these projects. Over two decades, 13 different streams and about 20 mine sites have been cleaned up in the nine mile. And I'll just take a minute and list some of those funders because they are. It's been over $5 million spent in that valley fixing these abandoned mines. But, you know, the main funders have been the Lolo National Forest, because a lot of this mine work starts on forest land or affects forest land. Then we also had FEMA fund a lot for some pre-disaster mitigation for climate resiliency, trying to build these wetlands back and reduce these these runoff events that are going through a fire hose. And now we have floodplain that stores water. Montana DEQ has been a really big funder and supporter through their 319 program, which is a sediment reduction pollutant reduction program. Montana DNC, teamed with Missoula County, has also been a big funder through their abandoned mine cleanup program. Way to go, Missoula County. Yeah, Missoula County. And this this is a plug for Missoula County. The staff at the county have been one of the strongest partnerships. When we need anything there. They're always willing to help with grant writing helping with reporting. The staff have been so good to work with at Missoula County. Like a true partnership.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:06] So it's interesting. All the funders you mentioned are public, which kind of makes sense. This is public land. The cleanup is public, but unlike a Superfund site, the entities that were principally responsible for the damage aren't available. That was just an observation. I wanted to go back a little bit to some of the questions on the on the land stuff. You said lifting the valley floor up. Yeah. Does that mean using the same types of equipment, but maybe modern versions that were used to destroy the landscape, to actually put it back together? And and are you taking the material that are in those long piles and spreading them out, or are you bringing Phil in? How do you lift the valley floor up?

Paul Parson: [00:13:39] No, that's a great question. And so to be economically feasible on these these projects, we can't really import any material. And we recognize that some of this material has washed away, gone down the nine mile into the Clark Fork, and it's probably sitting in behind a dam in Thompson Falls or Noxen. So essentially we've lost some of that material. But what we've done is exactly that. It's mostly bulldozers and excavators with big haul trucks. And so we have consultants that we've been lucky enough to work with, River design Group out of Whitefish for a majority of this work. And so they'll come up with a three dimensional plan for this floodplain before we even start rebuilding a new river. And they'll level the whole thing with bulldozers. And the operators that we've had have also been really good, super fortunate to have not local, but Montana based construction companies on all this stuff.

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:29] How about the timber that's on top of some of these piles?

Paul Parson: [00:14:32] We've analyzed that to try to get it to market, talk to different foresters and to get access to some of these mine piles is cost prohibitive to try to get that timber.

Juanita Vero: [00:14:43] Because of the terrain, because.

Paul Parson: [00:14:44] It's so vertical and up and down. And these mine piles are so narrow.

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:48] It was it was challenging to walk over.

Paul Parson: [00:14:49] It's hard to walk on. Yeah. Like if you try to walk across valley, across these piles, you're climbing 20, 30ft and dropping 20, 30ft really on steep, loose terrain. And then there's a giant pit at the bottom that's filled with water.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:15:03] So the woody material is basically left or used on site.

Paul Parson: [00:15:07] Exactly. We reuse.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:08] Every piece.

Paul Parson: [00:15:10] Yep. And so we use it for building our stream bank. It provides stability along the stream banks. It's a, you know, a natural process to have wood in your system. And we have it in the river. And then we've also used it. We've buried it all throughout the floodplain. And that provides we don't have any topsoil left, all the topsoil washed away. And so we're trying to build this soil profile from scratch and, and having this chunked up wood product that's leftover from the trees that are on the piles that restarts the the soil.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:36] Generates some nitrogen.

Paul Parson: [00:15:38] Yeah, but but hopefully if we build it properly over time, the flooding events that will occur will bring in nutrients. Yeah, but our floodplain needs to have some sort of stability until roots and in plants can take hold.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:51] So you knock down these piles, elevate the floor of the valley, and then you have to move the river back. Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:15:57] Then we build the channel in the dry. And how do.

Juanita Vero: [00:16:00] You know where the channel is supposed to go or what it's supposed to look like? Well, Rob, just, like, conversed with the stars to figure that out. No, that's.

Paul Parson: [00:16:09] That's there's a whole science and engineering field dedicated to that. And it's really we were fortunate in that if you look at the Jocko River, one drainage over the hills from the Nine Mile Valley, that's an analogous stream system. And so you can study that stream system, similar basin size, similar run off, obviously similar weather patterns being so close. And so you can study these intact river systems to build something from scratch.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:16:34] And Paul. So I guess along those lines is, is restoration really the word to use? Because I think that might conjure up in some people's minds the idea we're putting it back exactly the way.

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:47] Restore it was.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:16:48] Before. Whereas what you've described is getting the pieces in place such that almost the system itself can begin to heal itself.

Paul Parson: [00:16:58] Exactly. No, that's that's really good. There are people in our field that don't like the word restore, because it does conjure up an image of it's back to how it was.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:07] But the concept of restorative as opposed to restoration restorative sounds like bringing back to health as opposed to bringing back to its original form.

Paul Parson: [00:17:16] Right. Well, and you have to remind yourselves, or we have to be aware that these stream systems really are almost like a living organism.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:22] They're so dynamic.

Paul Parson: [00:17:23] Constantly changing, and so we're not restoring it into a fixed state. Can we have it back into a valley wide, wet complex in our lifetime with full, you know, mature cedar groves along the edges? Like, that's not going to happen in my lifetime. But the goal is to jumpstart it so it can get to that step. And so the best process that we have right now is to kind of rebuild the valley back to where we think it was, get water back on the landscape. That'll jumpstart it through nutrient storage and plant growth, and then get the canopies up where we can have these other species that come in later in succession come back.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:00] Yeah, it sounds like you're designing and creating the preconditions for health.

Paul Parson: [00:18:04] Exactly, exactly. Just just trying to give it that chance to heal itself. And and there's a lot of dynamics at play in that. And part of that is, is having beaver in the system and in, in the nine mile. Really fortunate that it's, um, F-w-p has a moratorium on trapping Beaver and Upper nine mile. And so there's active beaver above all this mining damage. There's full like couple mile complex of good willows. Beaver. Yeah. And good willows and just wet. And there's moose everywhere. And it looks like when you're walking in there, you just think there's going to be a grizzly around every corner because it's so thick and so vegetative. And that's kind of another analog system that we used for this. But we knew that we couldn't. You can't just go out and build a complex wetland system and make it look like that right away. But what we found is Beaver were trying to colonize these mine sections, but they couldn't live in those systems. One, there was a lack of food. There were no willows, which they need. And then two, they would try and build a lodge or a dam. And it seemed like every spring with the runoff in that straight and narrow canal like ditch, those beaver dams would just blow out every year. And so they were never successful in colonizing these mind reaches. What we're finding now is as we move down, and we've done six phases of this mainstem work, 2 to 3 years. When we're done, the willows are 3 to 4ft high, and that's when we start seeing beaver moving down valley from this colony that's up above. And so through the years, we've seen this, this beaver expansion into these systems. And the valley is wet in these areas where the beaver have come back.

Josh Slotnick: [00:19:39] And so it sounds like it might not take that long.

Paul Parson: [00:19:42] Actually, it's happening a lot faster than we envisioned.

Josh Slotnick: [00:19:45] After you guys are done. Yeah. And the beavers arrive. Things start to unfold exactly on a larger scale. Spending all this public money. The five funders were big public. Big public entities. That means it's people's taxes. Why are we spending all this money to do this? Why not do something else? And at the end, what species are going to be there that aren't there now? And is it worth it? I guess to.

Paul Parson: [00:20:07] Answer your last question first, it's definitely worth it. You know why? Why spend that? I've asked myself that a lot too. It's like you want to use this money to the best of our ability, and spending time and doing due diligence and making sure that we're effectively spending public money. Take that pretty seriously. By putting this back together, we're not only restarting this whole headwaters system back into a water storage system that is effectively cooling water, reducing flooding and reducing the sediment downstream. A lot of the ranches downstream, the Nine Mile Creek, gets filled up with sediment. It's a problem all the way down. Death by a thousand cuts is what we call it. And so if we can start to put this back together. Reduce stream temperature. Store more water. Cold water that then is released later in the year. We have cold water downstream that's coming from nine mile from this restored work. And so what does that do? You know, it was really habitat limited when we started. If you have these fire hose ditch systems that during spring runoff are just raging with all this confined water, that's when our native fish, cutthroat, are going upstream out of the Clark Fork to spawn. And they, [00:21:18] you know, back in the day, I was reading that they called Nine Mile the fish factory of this part of the Clark Fork. It was really good spawning grounds, but that didn't exist. And it couldn't because there wasn't any spawning gravel. There weren't. It was just the flows were too intense for fish to get up in the spring when they were wanting to spawn. And if they did make it, there wasn't anywhere to spawn because all the rock was too big, because the gravels that they spawn down. [00:21:41]

Paul Parson: [00:21:41]  [00:21:41]They were all down in the Clark Fork behind the Thompson Falls Dam. And so now that we've dispersed, that energy, spread, this made this floodplain where the water can flow out, in this velocities in the stream are way lower. Those fish are now making it. They're coming 20 miles up to spawn. And as soon as we finish a restored reach the next spring, there's giant, cutthroat, and rainbow in there spawning in the spring, you can go look at them, look at their spawning redds. It's really cool. [00:22:07] And so what we're seeing now is, is not just stunted old fish. We're seeing all age classes of fish from Little Fry all the way up to, you know, fully mature fish. They're still coming up there to spawn, then heading back down to the Clark Fork. And so our species up there are mostly cutthroat and rainbow and hybridized cut bows. We're starting to see more brown trout, which isn't a great thing for us. I mean, they're fun to fish for, but what that's telling us is the water is getting warmer and the habitat isn't as great, but that's happening all over western Montana. We're seeing brown trout kind of nose into these areas where they previously didn't exist. And then there's a lot of non-native brook trout up there. And, and that's, I think, a byproduct of a lot of these old mining ponds. They really thrive in this warmer, worse quality water than our native fish. There were bull trout in Nine Mile Creek for a while, but we have done DNA sampling in there with fish, wildlife and parks.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:00] And when do you think they were last there?

Paul Parson: [00:23:02] They still nose in in the summer looking for cold water refugia, but to actually have like viable populations.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:10] I guess when was it last documented that bull trout were in the system.

Paul Parson: [00:23:13] Like viable populations? I'm not sure. Probably 15 years ago. I mean, we're we're watching bull trout blink out. And a lot of places are they're struggling in a lot of places. Populations are pretty threatened. Building fixing these places isn't going to hurt. I'm not saying it's going to be the cure all to bring bull trout back, but we knew in the state that it was.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:31] They're just an indicator of of. Yeah. Systems health.

Paul Parson: [00:23:34] Exactly, exactly. You know, along with that to you know, to not just tout the benefits for trout. You look at when we have these big wetland restoration projects is essentially what it is. Floodplain wetland restoration. The amount of songbirds and migratory birds that have come back is just unreal. If you just go up in the morning and sit in some of these restored reaches and listen to how many birds are there, it's phenomenal. On the project sites, you know, we have wolves moving through lots of moose, lots of elk. It's just a lot better place for all animals than five miles of mine piles.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:24:09] It sounds like this is a great case study that could be replicable elsewhere in the country or the region. Have you seen that be the case? Have you seen folks look to this project as an example of what could be done? And secondly, any lessons learned as you're doing some trial and error, all based in science?

Paul Parson: [00:24:29] Yeah, it has been a lot of trial and error, and I've been really fortunate to have these series of projects in succession where you get to analyze it one, two, three, four, five, six, ten, 15 years after it's been done and see what worked and what didn't. So yeah, I guess to answer your question, there have been quite a few people visit the site and take ideas. So I think that we have definitely provided an opportunity for people to come and study this and analyze it. There's been, I think, three masters thesis come out of that out of the nine mile, you know, lots of undergraduate research. Right now. We have a carbon sequestration study going on. It's actually some Trout Unlimited scientists that are doing that, looking at how much wood we've buried and thrown in the earth. Yeah, that's just in its infancy right now. But that's that's a question that people are asking, like, how can we store carbon on on these giant landscapes? And what we've been doing actually is a good fit for that, where we're burying trees and wood in the floodplain. But I guess I can't remember your second question. Oh, just.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:28] Just, uh, and and as you're doing this sequentially, undoubtedly you've learned some lessons along the way that that worked. Uh, this actually didn't work. We're going to try something different. Any. Yeah. Any of those that, uh, rise to the surface in your memory? Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:25:44] I think one thing I would tell anyone getting into the restoration world is don't count on coming back. You know. What do.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:51] You mean? Yeah. What do.

Paul Parson: [00:25:53] You get? Funding for a certain project? Funding is hard to get. You know, like I said, we have so many funders. There'll be 5 or 6 funders when we go to construction next year. So it's been 3 to 4 years of grant writing to make one construction season happen. They don't want you coming back for money, you know, like you got to finish. Yeah, you do what you tell them you're going to do and so don't leave things behind. And that's a lesson that I've learned the hard way in the past, in that we left some of those mine piles because we didn't have enough money, and it was going to be another 100, $200,000 to move more mine piles. And we thought, well, we have enough valley width and it works. It's fine. But I look at it and I'm like, oh, we're not going back. And those mine piles are still there.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:36] They'll be there forever.

Paul Parson: [00:26:37] Yeah. It's like.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:38] It didn't do.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:26:38] A smaller geographic area, but yeah, Really?

Paul Parson: [00:26:42] Yep. Yep. And I'm just eager to get down Valley. Yeah. And so that was our our second phase that we did see that.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:49] Question about economics, thinking about how much wealth was pulled out of this ground. Mhm. And the expense that it's taken to attempt to be restorative in how we treat it now. Does it balance out. Do you think humanity extracted more wealth if we're not thinking, even thinking about the inherent wealth in ecosystems, just the dollars was more pulled out or spent putting it back together?

Paul Parson: [00:27:12] I ask myself that all the time. We have no way to know.

Juanita Vero: [00:27:15] I mean, but the folks, the folks who are mining this, they they didn't become filthy rich doing this.

Paul Parson: [00:27:21] No, they didn't. And people always ask me like, were they finding gold?

Juanita Vero: [00:27:26] Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:27:27] And it's I, I just think back to if it's a 1 or 2 person operation back in the 60s and 70s with a bulldozer and some other equipment that they're piecing together, they were finding gold and if they weren't, they were leaving. And that was the case. I think the guy that did a lot of this last swipe at nine Mile, he picked up and went to Lincoln when he was done.

Josh Slotnick: [00:27:47] Is this kind of mining a little bit like gambling?

Paul Parson: [00:27:49] I think it is. I think mining is sometimes gambling.

Josh Slotnick: [00:27:52] And that the the potential for a big windfall encourages people to do things that maybe they wouldn't do otherwise.

Paul Parson: [00:27:59] Yeah. Yeah, it's.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:01] I think that's exactly right. My, my great my grandfather, the scofflaw.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:06] This is a different one.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:07] Different different.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:08] One.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:08] More law abiding than the other one. But nonetheless we can do an episode on that.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:13] Guy.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:28:14] Nonetheless. He had a silver mine in Southeast Alaska, and it was total speculation. He had another business, a fish packing business that basically bankrolled the silver mine, the silver mining operation. I don't think he ever broke even on the silver mine. In fact, he probably lost money on it. But yeah, I don't think that's uncommon.

Paul Parson: [00:28:35] Yeah, no, it's not uncommon for mines to stop production and they run out of what they're trying to get.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:42] How did you get involved with this? Yeah. What's your origin story with Trout Unlimited?

Paul Parson: [00:28:47] Uh, my origin story. So I have a background in engineering, and like I said, Rob Roberts, my predecessor, who was also a project manager with Trout Unlimited at the time, I was working for a consulting firm here in Missoula, and Rob was hiring us to do some of the design and surveys. So I had surveyed all those piles by hand before we had GPS survey equipment. So I was pretty familiar with it. And Rob had worked for Trout Unlimited for over ten years.

Juanita Vero: [00:29:13] When you're introduced to this, what did you think of this project? You were like, oh yeah, this is a great idea. Or were you like, this is crazy that I'm getting paid?

Paul Parson: [00:29:20] Yeah, no, it's kind of the concept is crazy, right? Like to build a complete destroyed system back to where? Where it is. And that's one of the beauties of of Rob is he just has these visions that other people don't have. And then once you start seeing, it's like, oh, yeah, this is totally possible. And we can scale this up. So yeah, I was just, you know, doing stream design and surveying and construction. And then he just asked if if I wanted a job at Trout Unlimited because he was taking off to sail around the world and needed a replacement.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:54] Guy with a big vision.

Paul Parson: [00:29:55] Yeah, big vision guy. He is. I was like, heck yeah, I want to work for Trout Unlimited. Um, so I've been there ever since. It's been 12, 13 years.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:30:05] Presumably there's other projects you're working on besides just nine mile.

Paul Parson: [00:30:10] Yeah, I'm currently working on a Superfund cleanup in Superior in Mineral County. Ah, yes. Our neighbors to the west. We're almost done with that one. It's been a two year process, and.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:20] Oh, that seems like only two years. That's. That's short. It's been.

Paul Parson: [00:30:24] I've been involved in that for over ten years or eight years long process. Two year construction window, I guess. Got it. So other projects going on, working with the Lolo National Forest. There's there's more mining damage up in in Mineral County, up in, in the Cedar Creek drainage that we're looking at fixing and just working on a lot of different stuff. I like to work in the woods, so as long as I can be up in the woods, I'll be good.

Josh Slotnick: [00:30:46] So if you were to offer advice to anybody who was going to do mining right now, knowing what you know about cleaning things up, what would you tell them?

Paul Parson: [00:30:54] Well, to start off, I'm not anti mining because we all need metals. Yeah, I think we just have to think beyond the 20 year life cycle of these mines and make sure that there is a way to clean them up. And oftentimes it's it's not the sites themselves that are the hardest to clean up and remediate. It's the water, you know, is there going to be a long term effects to the water systems?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:31:16] So take nine mile as an example. Is there or anywhere where placer mining could be a possibility? Is there a way to do placer mining in a more environmentally sensitive manner or or not? Is is that just I mean, is it how.

Paul Parson: [00:31:34] Sensitive do you want to call sensitive? Yeah.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:31:36] So I guess in.

Paul Parson: [00:31:37] The I mean, it's on a scale, right? I think that there's ways to responsibly mind. I don't think anytime you're bulldozing wetlands and streams and there's ways to do it where it has less of an impact. Hard rock mining is a whole nother story. And we didn't. What does that mean? We described placer mining where you're actually looking for gold and flakes, nuggets, things like that that exist in a system already. So hard rock mining is where you're chasing the veins of minerals within the rock. And so you're having to follow that. So that's what we think of when we think of like tunneling into a mountain and using dynamite and then pulling that rock out. And oftentimes it's it's processed mechanically. So it's crushed into like a powder so that it can then be chemically treated to remove the metals, and you crush it up into a fine powder so that those chemicals have easier access to the surface area of the metals. And then you can separate out the rock and the metals. Those are very intensive. They take a lot of processing. You know, you may be following a vein. That's the side, you know, the width of your pinky to get, you know how many ounces per ton of rock?

Josh Slotnick: [00:32:43] Ounces per ton.

Paul Parson: [00:32:45] Yeah. There's a lot of processing that goes into hard rock mines. The downfall of those systems is they need a lot of water to process this stuff. And so and then you end up with a byproduct.

Juanita Vero: [00:32:55] Super toxic.

Paul Parson: [00:32:56] Mountains and mountains.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:32:58] Crushed.

Paul Parson: [00:32:59] Yeah. I mean, there's the the west is filled with these relic abandoned mines, these hard rock mine sites that continue to pollute water. And that's just that's something that hopefully, you know, Trout Unlimited and future partners, we can continue to raise money to fix these things because a lot of times those companies have gone bankrupt, and there's not a responsible party that there can be a Superfund action.

Josh Slotnick: [00:33:22] So are there modern hard rock mines that are doing their work in a way that you feel like would be more responsible, or cleanup won't be as expensive?

Juanita Vero: [00:33:31] That's they just put up more money for cleanup? Is that the responsible thing to do or what? Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:33:37] I mean, modern minds in the United States have to be bonded. And so you put the bonding in. One of the problems with bonding is if you need water treatment in perpetuity.

Josh Slotnick: [00:33:46] In perpetuity, it doesn't bond big enough. Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:33:50] And you can't divide or multiply by infinity. It doesn't work. The math doesn't. I mean, you could have as much bonding on the planet, but what's who's going to be paying for that water treatment in 100 years? And that's something I think that we need to start thinking about is this these multi multi generations. Because some of these mine sites that we're working with now, they were started 100 years ago and now we're dealing with that. And so I don't have an answer to that I don't think anyone does. The bottom line is try not to create a problem that isn't fixable.

Josh Slotnick: [00:34:19] That's it. That's a great.

Juanita Vero: [00:34:20] Ethic right there.

Josh Slotnick: [00:34:21] That's just abide by that. It's pretty.

Paul Parson: [00:34:23] Simple. But I think when you're mining, there are a lot of unknowns.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:34:27] In the sort of work that Trout Unlimited does relative to the sort of restoration action, whether it's Nine Mile or anywhere else. Is there any potential liability? It's kind of a bit of a loaded question, because a few years ago, I had the opportunity to testify before Congress on potential Good Samaritan legislation, and Trout Unlimited was at the table with me there. And I believe a piece of legislation finally got over the finish line this last year on this topic. So could you talk a little bit more? Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:35:02] No, Dave, and the thanks to you for for going back to DC and testifying and being a part of that. So Trout Unlimited has been working on this liability issue for as long as we've been working on abandoned mines, because the way the laws read, if you touch a mine to clean it up, you actually own it. You. And so we've been real hesitant to work on some of these sites without liability protections. And so what Dave was describing is the Good Samaritan law was just signed into, signed by President Biden two weeks ago. And it's been a long time coming, bipartisan support to pull this together. And what it'll do is it'll allow organizations like Trout Unlimited to go. We can now go work on a mine site without fear of owning in perpetuity the liabilities on that mine. If we're acting in good faith. It's to be seen. It doesn't come with funding. These projects are really expensive, you know, in the millions, usually for hard Rock mine cleanup. But it's a huge step for us to be able to start to tackle some of these mines.

Juanita Vero: [00:36:00] That's great.

Josh Slotnick: [00:36:01] So, Paul. Yeah. Science, engineering, ecology, all of these are artifacts of culture. They are, in a sense, what we decide to do as a culture at any one moment when you don't have your science and engineering and ecology hats on, you dabble in culture. Have you in the recent past run into something you thought, wow, that was really memorable. And I'm thinking this could be a podcast or a book or just a thought. You heard somebody express somewhere something so valuable or memorable you'd want to pass it on.

Paul Parson: [00:36:29] Oh, man. Yeah. I've been reading a book called Opportunity, Montana.

Josh Slotnick: [00:36:32] About the town?

Paul Parson: [00:36:34] Yeah. Well, it's it's really about the legacy of the upper Clark Fork and the mining and the impacts and just socioeconomics of a lot of times, these mining legacies and these impacts unduly affect poorer communities. Always. Yeah. And so that's that's kind of been on my mind a lot. You know, as we work in Mineral County and we work in some of these rural areas, it's.

Juanita Vero: [00:36:56] Who wrote that.

Paul Parson: [00:36:57] Gosh, I can't remember his name. He's a local guy. I didn't look that up when we.

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:02] Took the dam out. The greater we took the dam out, didn't we? Move a bunch of that sludge.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:06] That's where it all went to, where it.

Paul Parson: [00:37:08] And people in Opportunity are wondering why it didn't stay in downtown.

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:11] We thought about putting it in the upper rattlesnake.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:13] But.

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:14] They said no. They said no.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:16] Yeah. Brad Tyler. Right?

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:17] Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Parson: [00:37:18] It's a good book. Cool.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:37:20] Well, thanks, Paul, for joining us.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:21] Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for.

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:23] Having me.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:37:23] Congratulations for the good work up there. Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:25] Yeah. What a great way to spend your working life, man. It's.

Paul Parson: [00:37:28] I feel really. I'm lucky. Really, really lucky to do what I do.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:32] Thanks, Miles. Lucky to have you. Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:36] Thanks for listening to the agenda. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot if you would rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you use.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:44] And if you know a friend who would like to keep up with what's happening in local government, be sure to recommend this podcast to them.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:37:50] The agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners is made possible with support from Missoula Community Access Television, better known as MCAT, and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division.

Josh Slotnick: [00:38:02] If you have a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, email it to communications@missoulacounty.us.

Juanita Vero: [00:38:10] To find out other ways to stay up to date with what's happening in Missoula County, go to Missoula.co/countyupdates.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:38:17] Thanks for listening.