A rare win-win for everybody

A plan to poison Soda Butte Creek offers a rare win-win opportunity for everyone involved.

Non-native brook trout live in the upper stretches of the stream which heads in the mountains above Cooke City and flows into Yellowstone National Park. Federal and state fisheries biologists want the brookies removed because they compete with native cutthroat trout for habitat and food.

Officials plan to use rotenone to kill all the fish in Soda Butte Creek upstream from Ice Box Canyon.

Here’s a better idea: reopen the mines.

For years the upper portion of Soda Butte was fishless. Toxins from old mine tailings leached into the creek rendering it relatively sterile. Cleanup of the old tailings pond above Cooke took a couple of decades, but eventually fish returned to Soda Butte. It was an environmental success story.

Now they say it’s time to poison the creek again.

So why not kill two birds with one stone?

Reopening the mines would provide those always much-needed jobs and save the state and the feds the expense and time involved in poisoning the creek.

The mine waste flowing downstream would again render the creek sterile killing all the fish. After a few years the mines would be shut down for pollution violations. The laid off miners could get work on the cleanup crew doing the remediation work on Soda Butte. Eventually brook trout would return -- need to be poisoned -- and the whole cycle of life would repeat itself.

Except maybe the brook trout won’t return.

Tommy Garrison probably planted the brookies and Tommy’s gone. An unsociable hermit, who lived most of his life in the mountains above Cooke, Garrison was quite fond of eating brook trout. He was rumored to have stocked them in lakes and streams throughout the Beartooth Mountains, transporting the fish in coffee cans.

Tommy died a number of years ago, but I suspect there still lives a scoflaw or two in the mountains who hanker for the tasty flesh of a brook trout, fried crisp in a hot skillet, or canned as fish pickles.

So given enough time, thanks to bucket biology, the brookies would most likely return, once more need to be removed, and provide good-paying jobs as a result.

Seldom do we have a chance to both save the environment and provide good-paying jobs in the process.

Seize the opportunity.

Do the right thing.

Parker Heinlein is at

[email protected]