Our hours: SVC's legacy of Volunteer stewardship

While five-gallon buckets brimmed with sloshing water may be a close challenger, t-posts are some of the most awkward things to be carried. At just over 10 pounds apiece, with studded, irregular edges and sharp anchoring wings, schlepping one of these eight-foot steel specimens to a fence project is an unwieldy affair. Add in some uneven floodplain terrain, and the fact that most of us underestimate pinched fingers and balance points while trying to carry more posts than we should, and you have all the ingredients for an exasperated "sheesh!" upon releasing the cargo – whether that occurs by intention of mishap.

And so why, you might ask, did Swan Valley Connections (SVC) order 188 of these clunky tools? Why would 11 volunteers (volunteers!) give up a Saturday to haul them around? Why would Anne Dahl – the day before one of the backpacking trips she cherishes so much in retirement – choose to extricate old t-posts from stony soils so that they could be reused or replaced?

For answers, we must go back at least 30 years, when the section of land where these t-posts were driven was a cutover floodplain, logged by the Plum Creek Timber Company and left without a name.

With the passage of Montana's Stream Management Zone law in 1991 – which aimed to protect the vulnerable, critical habitat where land and water meet – these 640 acres were unlikely to yield lumber again. They soon became added to thousands more acres Plum Creek aimed to sell off at a pace and scale of such divestment that shocked local people to realize: They cared. Sometimes for different reasons or different goals, but they cared enough about the same land to have tough conversations about its future. And through that process, they realized this parcel, so vital to diverse fish and wildlife, was a priority worth protecting. In partnership with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Swan Ecosystem Center purchased the section in 2006 and the Elk Creek Conservation Area (ECCA) was born.

Never mind that ECCA's founding success helped catalyze the conservation of 310,000 acres in more cohesive, public ownership as part of the Montana Legacy Project, the ECCA in itself was – and remains – a gem of common ground. Anne Dahl helped turn talk among neighbors into action, and when she stepped up to lead the Swan Ecosystem Center as its first Executive Director in 1997, the ECCA played a centering role in her efforts to build the culture of collaborative, local stewardship that we strive to uphold to this day. At the ECCA, Anne empowered passionate educators like Diann Ericson to engage local kids in hands-on stream education, expanded the land's influence with a supportive community and forged partnerships across boundaries with some of the finest conservation experts around.

Thanks to support from the Montana Watershed Coordination Council and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, SVC held two volunteer-driven workdays this summer to carry on this legacy. The first of these workdays, on June 13, focused on the removal of houndstongue, a pernicious invasive plant that is poisonous to wildlife. The second of these workdays, on July 11, focused on the repair, removal and replacement of fence exclosures designed to deter overbrowsing and benefit establishment of shrubs like willows, aspens and cottonwoods. And both workdays were driven by a shared, core goal: to restore diverse native woody plants, with volunteers, in the ECCA floodplain.

It will likely take centuries to fully restore dynamic structure to the Elk Creek floodplain, but with volunteer help, it takes seconds to see changes begin. For the first workday, as soon as we stepped off the road, it was clear that we were pulling houndstongue in historic channels of the creek; where the water was, the weeds now grew. But with more than 15 people in over 6 hours, we prevented thousands of new plants from going to seed.

At the second workday, the positive regrowth of willows and cottonwoods protected by fencing in previous years inspired us to do the same for the next generation, as did the maturing spruce, planted in the moist microclimates of stumps from trees cut a few decades before. Those were also spruce that caring volunteers watered with sloshing, five-gallon buckets to ensure they'd get a good start.

The Elk Creek Conservation Area did not have to exist. It does exist because people, over the long term, have cared about it enough to give it their time. Nonprofit organizations like SVC would financially collapse without these volunteer contributions, which are monetized in Montana at a rate of $23.09 per hour, a value that is crucial for us to receive grants and advance our mission.

But there's also a value when we realize, together, that the land itself is a gift that we cannot take for granted. Our hours stewarding natural habitat restore people, too, and we're thankful for volunteers who are willing to endure tough conversations, long hours in summer heat, and heavy t-posts for the reward of healing land, a treasure that will outlast us all.