Blackfoot Challenge hosts community meetings to address local river recreation challenges

With fishing access sites overflowing in the summer, drought pressure on the rivers, more garbage, increased weeds along roadsides and packed eateries, it's obvious there's more traffic in the Blackfoot watershed.

Over the past few years the Blackfoot Challenge, a local watershed stewardship nonprofit focused on the Blackfoot River drainage, has been hearing more concerns about and interest in growing recreational pressures in the Blackfoot Valley watershed. Meetings have been held in communities to get individuals ideas, concerns and suggestions about recreation.

At a statewide level, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has recently developed a River Recreation Advisory Council to come up with a set of statewide recommendations for managing river recreation and administering the use of water-related activities under the authority of FWP. The council has held statewide public scoping meetings on river recreation in September and had a River Recreation Advisory Board workshop in October.

"It's a really big issue and (it's) going to take some time to wrap our heads around it," Clancy Jandreau, Blackfoot Challenge water steward, said. "There's no objective in mind, we're focusing on the process and the outcome will become known."

Two years ago the Blackfoot Challenge started a subcommittee to initiate the conversation around recreation with representative sportsmen, landowners and public agencies.

"We really need to take a ridgetop to ridgetop approach of looking at recreation across the landscape," Jandreau said.

The current step in the process is having public meetings throughout communities in the watershed, including Seeley Lake, Lincoln, Helmville, Ovando, Bonner and Greenough, to gather information from local people on recreation pressures. The Blackfoot Challenge hired the University of Montana Parks and Recreation department to facilitate the meetings. Students working on their capstone projects are collecting information and working with faculty to gather each community's opinions and suggestions then assimilate a report representing everyone.

At the meeting in Helmville the room had three easels set up with discussion questions on each. The group of 22 split themselves into three groups and had discussions at each station while UM faculty and students wrote down people's ideas about the topics.

Five questions were discussed, looking for insight on topics around the importance of recreational opportunities and issues and concerns with recreation in one's community.

An upcoming meeting will be held in Seeley Lake on Oct. 28 at the Seeley Lake Community Foundation and Oct. 30 in Lincoln at the Library Community Room.

Follow-up public meetings will be held in November and December at two central locations to discuss the results of this survey. People can access and fill out the survey if they cannot attend a meeting.

Survey link: https://umt.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ 9WDuavEcsR3L0P4