"The Grand Plan To Save The Yellowstone River"

"Can one man’s pie-in-the-sky idea save one the West’s most iconic and underloved rivers?"

"On a rose-tinted summer evening near Billings, Montana, a football-shaped dory drifts down the Yellowstone River, its flat bottom skimming wakeless over the roiling surface. Mike Penfold, a former Bureau of Land Management state director, mans the oars with the vigor of an Olympic rower. Dale Anderson, a bearded ex-teacher, perches in the bucket seat. The river tightens into a narrow canyon, hemmed by sandstone cliffs that glow in the fading light. Two hundred and nine years earlier, Captain William Clark’s Corps of Discovery drifted past this very spot during its homeward trek from the Pacific.

'You wonder what was going on in Clark’s brain when he saw that,' Penfold, 78, says, nodding at the radiant cliffs. A cowboy hat shades his broad, florid face, and his T-shirt bears the slogan #KeepItPublic. 'Today, the Yellowstone seems quiet and easy,' he adds, pirouetting the dory away from a groping log. 'But there are times when this river is damn-well dangerous.'
 
Farther downstream, the Yellowstone’s mood swings are scrawled across the landscape. Tangled root wads burst from naked clay banks, and gravel bars jut into the current. The wheat and beet farmers whose properties abut the river don’t appreciate its capriciousness; they’ve piled the banks with concrete blocks, warped nests of rebar and rusted-out pickup trucks to thwart erosion. But floods and ice jams regularly tear apart the riprap and send junk whirling downriver. Every year, volunteers extract some 7,000 pounds of detritus. Anderson, who swears he once saw an ex-wife’s Buick in the rubble, watches the riprap slide by, arms folded. 'Man, that’s ugly,'he mutters.'"

Ben Goldfarb reports for High Country News June 27, 2016.