Two Rivers, One Removed Dam, and What Happens When You Give Wild Trout Their Water Back

Dam removal doesn’t always make headlines the way it should — but when a century-old structure comes out and two rivers essentially come back from the dead, that’s a story worth paying attention to. The American Wild just dropped a video documenting exactly that, and if you care about wild fish, free-flowing water, or the future of Montana’s river systems, this one’s going to hit home.

Montana has a complicated relationship with its dams. Some — like Fort Peck on the Missouri — have become world-class fisheries in their own right, pumping out trophy walleye and monster northern pike year after year. But smaller, aging dams on coldwater tributaries tell a different story. They block native westslope cutthroat trout and bull trout from reaching spawning habitat, raise water temperatures to levels that stress or kill fish during summer low flows, and fragment populations that were once connected across entire drainages. When you’ve got a concrete structure sitting in a small mountain tributary that hasn’t seen a spawning run in 80 years, you’re not maintaining history — you’re erasing it.

Montana’s Biggest Dam Removal Success Story

The most well-known example of dam removal working in Montana is the Milltown Dam on the Clark Fork River near Missoula. Milltown had been sitting at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers since 1908, and the reservoir behind it had accumulated over six million cubic yards of copper-contaminated sediment from upstream Superfund sites in Anaconda and Butte. After years of cleanup planning and negotiation, the dam came out between 2006 and 2008. The results surprised even the researchers who’d been predicting recovery. Bull trout recolonized the lower Blackfoot River within a season or two of removal. Water temperatures dropped. Sediment that had been locked behind concrete for a century began moving naturally again. The Clark Fork at Missoula today is a genuinely different river than it was 20 years ago — and it’s still improving.

That project set a template that Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and partners like Trout Unlimited have been replicating on smaller scales ever since. Irrigation diversion dams on tributaries to the Bitterroot, Flathead, and Missouri drainages have been removed or retrofitted with fish passage structures over the past two decades. Some of these were low-head dams that hadn’t generated power or stored significant water in years — they were just sitting there, blocking fish. Taking them out is often cheaper than maintaining them, and the ecological return is immediate.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like for Anglers

Here’s the practical side of this for anyone who fishes Montana’s smaller streams: recovering populations of westslope cutthroat and bull trout don’t show up everywhere at once. Recovery tends to move upstream from the removal site as fish locate and colonize newly accessible habitat. If you’re fishing a tributary system where a barrier has recently come out, give it a few seasons before you expect to find fish well above the old dam site. The fish find the water — they just need time to spread out and establish.

Bull trout, it’s worth noting, are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and in Montana nearly all waters are closed to angling for them — any bull trout caught incidentally must be released with no delay. Only a few specific waters (Lake Koocanusa, Hungry Horse Reservoir, and part of the South Fork Flathead River) are open under a regulated, permit-based bull trout season, and even there a Catch Card is required. If you’re fishing a drainage where bull trout are present — the Flathead system, the upper Clark Fork tributaries, parts of the Missouri headwaters — know your regulations before you wet a line. Mistaking a bull trout for a large brook trout is an easy error that carries real consequences. The key field ID: bull trout have no black spots, only pale yellow, orange, and red spots on a dark olive-green body, and no worm-like markings on the dorsal fin that brook trout show.

Why This Matters Beyond the Fish

Anglers tend to think in terms of seasons — what’s biting now, where the fish are holding, what the regulations say for this stretch of water. River restoration plays out on a longer clock, and it’s easy to miss how much cumulative progress has been made over the past 20 years in Montana. Miles of river that hadn’t seen a spawning cutthroat in decades can recover faster than most people expect once the barriers come out and the water runs cold and clean again.

Whether you’re a wade angler chasing cutthroat on a small tributary in the Bitterroot drainage, a floater working the Clark Fork between Missoula and Deer Lodge, or just someone who wants Montana’s rivers to still be worth fishing in 30 years, this video is worth the time. Dam removal is conservation in its most literal form — put the river back the way it was, and let it do the rest.

Editor’s note: Corrected a fishing-regulation statement: bull trout are not simply catch-and-release statewide — most Montana waters are closed to bull trout angling, with limited regulated, permit-based seasons on a few named waters.