The city of Missoula acquired 10 dams across seven lakes in 2017 following the city’s purchase of the former Mountain Water Company. The century-old dams were built between 1911 and 1923 and are now a costly and time-consuming burden to maintain. A proposal to remove one of the dams is awaiting approval.
The city of Missoula, the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, the U.S. Forest Service and other partnered agencies are tackling a $500,000 dam decommissioning in the remote Rattlesnake Wilderness.
Trout Unlimited Senior Project Manager Rob Roberts has been envisioning the project and working through its kinks since 2021.
“It’s an interesting project because it's fairly straightforward from a technical standpoint,” Roberts says.
Roberts said the actual dam, situated on McKinley Lake, is fairly small and would be easy to deconstruct if it were in the front country or somewhere closer to town. But the remote, limited accessibility of the site makes the project much more difficult and more expensive.
Lolo National Forest Recreation Program Manager Katie Knotek is keenly aware of the arduous nature of projects in designated Wilderness areas. Knotek says that's, "because of the backcountry nature of our wilderness areas and how complicated it can be to access them, as well as the prohibitions on the way that we manage them in order to protect them under the 1964 Wilderness Act. So, it just always takes more logistical planning to carry out any Wilderness project versus another project that may happen on the National Forest in a non-Wilderness area.”
Knotek is part of a Forest Service led interdisciplinary team that is assessing the types of tools that may be used and how construction contractors will be able to access the dam site, which is not accessible by vehicle.
“As stewards of the Rattlesnake Wilderness, we have to do due diligence in analyzing the effects to the land surrounding the dam and analyzing terms and conditions on how the project is conducted in order to minimize those impacts to surrounding land,” Knotek says.
The project went through a public comment period last spring.
Knotek expects the Forest Service’s environmental review and final decision will be released at the end of November. Roberts is ready to move on to the next stages of the project soon after.
“It’s teed up. It's ready to go,” he says.
Roberts says any type of project will have some environmental impact on the Wilderness area. Trout Unlimited’s end goal is to re-nature the area and allow the alpine water from McKinley Lake to flow freely. The project will also return management of the area back to the Forest Service, relieving the city of Missoula of annual maintenance and burdensome repairs.
Roberts thinks that the project is a worthwhile endeavor even if few Missoulians make the trek up to McKinley Lake and the other Rattlesnake Wilderness lakes.
“I think my purpose is to sort of leave the same legacy up there so that this place re-naturalizes. We do it in a way that, you know, people can feel good about,” he says.
Roberts has his eye on nine other city-owned dams in the Rattlesnake Wilderness that could be removed in future projects. Deconstruction of the McKinley Lake Dam is slated to begin in summer 2024.