How Deep Does It Go? Future of Area Water Monitoring in Question

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article has been updated to reflect a fuller scope of services Bozeman's NOROCK office performs. 

Only a few of the dots on the U.S. Geological Survey National Water Dashboard appear gray at this midpoint of March.

The streamflow monitors at Henry’s Fork, Idaho and Rock Creek near Red Lodge, Montana, have no current discharge rates. Click on the interactive map’s gray dots there and you read “Affected by ice,” which is reasonable for this early in the trout-hunting season. The Fall River Yellowstone Canal site near Squirrel, Idaho, is gray due to equipment malfunction.

Most other dots are orange or green. The Madison River gauge near West Yellowstone read 356 cubic feet per second on March 21, getting an orange dot signifying “below normal for this day-of-year.” The Boulder River near Big Timber was flowing at 131 cfs: its green dot signified “normal for this day-of-year.”

What’s not normal are the rumblings going through the federal government of potential loss of important services like river monitors. No one at USGS was willing to talk on the record about staff layoffs or maintenance budget cuts. 

But one monitoring source was making a public statement of sorts. The Department of Government Efficiency “Wall of Receipts,” which has a note at the top declaring itself “An official website of the United States Government,” claims it has created $115 billion in savings as of March 21, or $714.29 per U.S. taxpayer. Dig into those savings receipts and you’ll find lease cancellations for federal offices. Among them are the terminations of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office contract in Lander, Wyoming ($109,873 savings), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office in Idaho Falls ($69,756 savings), and the USGS office in Bozeman ($369,838 savings) called the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, or NOROCK.

The DOGE website states “contract termination notices can have up to a 1 month lag,” making it hard to pin down the impact of each change. That hasn’t stopped rumors from growing like fish tales.

“I’ve talked to friends and colleagues in the agency, and they’ve been told they’re on the chopping block,” said Pat Byorth at Bozeman’s Trout Unlimited chapter office. “The field staff — without them, the [water] gauges aren’t meaningful. Each gauge in a given area, they’ve got to visit at least twice a year to keep them up to date. That takes a lot of people, or a lot of days with a few people.”

If they can get out of the office. A Department of Interior policy restricting government credit cards to $1 has crippled staffers’ ability to buy gas for field work, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. That could make fixing that monitor in Squirrel, Idaho, challenging. 

“It looks like the Trump administration is monkeywrenching government by needlessly disrupting even basic operations,” Rocky Mountain PEER Director Chandra Rosenthal said in a press release. “The individual Interior agencies, such as the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, have been taken by surprise and are themselves grasping for additional guidance.”

Within an hour’s drive of Yellowstone National Park’s borders, USGS operates more than 80 stream monitoring sites. More than a dozen track the Snake River’s flow just between Grand Teton National Park’s Jackson Lake and Lorenzo, Idaho. The Yellowstone River has sites at Corwin Springs and Livingston. The Gallatin River gets checked at Gallatin Gateway and again at Logan. The Madison has sites above and below Cameron, and again just after Ennis Lake.

The U.S. Geological Survey has five core missions. It is the nation’s mapping service, responsible for topographic and geologic datasets that underpin economic, agricultural, public safety and natural resource imagery. Its scientists monitor above-ground ecosystems and below-ground energy and mineral resources. They research and monitor a wide range of natural hazards like flood zones and earthquake faults. The Water Resources Mission Area oversees groundwater supplies, water quality, consumption and streamflow.

That last duty may be one of the agency’s most popular features. Farmers and ranchers use those stream reports to schedule planting and pasture rotation. Boaters watch the levels to know when it's deep enough to float. And anglers consider them the tarot deck that predicts how the fishing day will go.

“If you’re just going in up to your ankles, it doesn’t matter how the river’s flowing,” said Tyler Mills, manager of Bozeman Fly Supply. “But for the general angler who takes it more seriously, those gauges are a useful tool and heavily used. If you just tied some new streamers and you’re going to hunt yourself a brown trout, you pay a lot of attention to those gauges.”

Bozeman Fly Supply’s Southwest Montana Fishing Report website has links to the relevant USGS streamflow gauges built into each of its river pages. The agency’s more expansive pages show historical water levels, flood stages and temperatures.

Temperature is the determining factor for fish survival in Montana. In water hotter than 70 degrees F, most species of trout will stress and can die. They also tend to congregate in deep pools seeking colder flows, which makes them vulnerable to predators. Additionally, they become more vulnerable to disease and parasites, at the same time those hazards benefit from warmer temperatures.

The response to all that are Montana’s “hoot-owl” restrictions, which the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks uses to limit angling on rivers and streams when the USGS gauges run hotter than 68 F. Last year, Yellowstone National Park’s Madison, Firehole and Gibbon rivers all closed to fishing in early July due to a summer heat wave and low winter snowpack. Soda Butte Creek, Slough Creek and parts of the Yellowstone, Lamar, Gardner and Snake rivers followed later in July. Glacier National Park’s North Fork of the Flathead River incurred its first-ever hoot-owl closure last year.

Members of Montana’s congressional delegation say the situation is under control. A spokeswoman at Sen. Steve Daines’ office said the list of potential office closures was to be reviewed “to ensure all facilities are being fully utilized.”

“Daines is working closely with the appropriate agencies to ensure critical services for Montanans are uninterrupted as President Trump works to reduce waste within the federal government,” she added.

Sen. Tim Sheehy’s office was more general.

“As the administration works to rein in spending and deliver government services more efficiently, Senator Sheehy is committed to working with our federal partners to ensure cost-saving measures are targeted responsibly and the critical frontline resources and services Montanans rely on are protected. As always, Senator Sheehy encourages folks to reach out to his office to receive timely, high-quality constituent services as they navigate the federal government.”

No plans have been announced for more efficient streamflow monitoring. However, on March 20, NPR reported the Interior Department is drawing up plans to cut some divisions by 40 percent.