Working and Playing the Land 



pedition. But the traffic was such, wrote Quinnett, 

 that dust "covered everything for 20 yards on either 

 side of the road .... From every point where you 

 could see a big pool or stretch of boulder-made 

 pockets of holding water. . . tire marks pressed 

 against the berm, and from these. . . a small, well- 

 beaten path led down the slope to the water's edge 

 like greasy thumbprints on a clean glass." 



Quinnett was seeing the fishing frenzy at its 

 height: summertime traffic on the Rock Creek road 

 peaked in 1984 and has fallen off considerably since 

 then.^-* But his conclusion that "people can hold 

 something so dear they crush the beauty from it" 

 echoed in the turf war that was just beginning. 



Row Versus Wade— The Great Western 

 Fishing Controversy 



Popularized on postcards as "row v. wade," 

 the battle between anglers who float the creek and 

 anglers who wade the creek has been every bit as 

 heated as the abortion battles summed up in the 

 court case of Roe v. Wade. The first fishing raft was 

 reported on Rock Creek in 1978 and as the populari- 

 ty of float fishing grew, anglers on the banks and 

 in the water began complaining: The river wasn't 

 big enough for both, they said. Float fishermen 

 clogged the road with raft-hauling trailers, choked 

 the Rock Creek canyon residents with dust and, at 

 the peak of the salmon-fly hatch in June, cluttered 

 the pristine waterway with as many as 100 boats an 

 hour. Above all, the rafters, no matter how polite, 

 spooked the trout. "Fishing success fell to zero for 

 periods ranging up to one hour after raft passage," 

 one angler from Oregon griped to the Fish, Wildlife 

 and Parks Department. ^5 



By 1985, the Lolo National Forest found it 

 necessary to restrict commercial rafting. The Forest 

 Service issued a three- year permit to four rafting 

 outfitters organized as the Clark Fork Float Fishing 

 Outfitters Association. Three years later, the state 

 and the Forest Service began a joint review of 

 floater-wader conflicts that demonstrated just how 

 complicated the problem was becoming. 



A 1988 state survey showed that, since the 

 Forest Service began requiring permits, commercial 

 floating had dropped to half its previous level. But 

 float fishing as a whole had more than doubled in 

 two years to account for 10.4 percent of all the 

 anglers on Rock Creek.*'*' In other words, the ma- 

 jority of boats on Rock Creek were not subject to 

 the commercial permit process: they were private. 



A 1988 Forest Service survey showed that 

 most contacts between waders and floaters were 

 pleasant, yet most respondents felt floating harm- 

 ed the quality of fishing. They wanted floating 

 banned. "^^ 



As the time came for the Forest Service to 

 revise guidelines and renew permits, the rhetoric 

 heated up. Paul S. Roos, one of the outfitters, plead- 

 ed with officials not to set a "precedent of 

 preference for one segment of the population" by 

 further restricting floating. *« Bankside anglers, 

 meanwhile, vented their disgust with rafters; the 

 same Oregonian who timed each floating disrup- 

 tion vowed he would give up and go to Idaho 

 "where one is not forced to endure this sort of 

 harassment."*'' 



Missoula District Ranger Dave Stack struck 

 a temporary compromise in 1988, issuing one-year 

 permits to the outfitters and for the first time, 

 restricting the commercial floating season. He urg- 

 ed private boaters to observe the same limits volun- 

 tarily. "I believe that the conflict between 

 bank/wade anglers and the floaters is real," Stack 

 wrote, "but I also believe there is an opportunity 

 to minimize conflict through better seasonal con- 

 trol of commercial floating and voluntary obser- 

 vance of restricted floating seasons by the recrea- 

 tion (unguided) floaters, "^o The season would end 

 June 30 or when the water flow dropped to 700 feet 

 per second, Stack decided, whichever came first. 



No matter how low the water dropped, pas- 

 sions still ran high. In 1989, a rafting guide offend- 

 ed by a sign explaining the new restrictions told a 

 Forest Service eniployee, "One day some floater will 

 throw that sign. . . into Rock Creek. But it won't 

 be me."^' From the other side, a resident wrote: "A 

 worse decision could not have been made . . . Even 

 if you are a slob outfitter, who arrogantly ignores 

 the rules, you can get renewed."^^ 



Stack nevertheless stayed his course and in 

 1990 issued five-year permits to the same four out- 

 fitters, while decreasing "boat days per year" to 200 

 from 300 and eliminating the flow provision— to 

 end the season each year on June 30. 



Despite threats by visitors to flee the floaters, 

 the number of out-of-staters on Rock Creek rose to 

 28 percent of all anglers in the 1988 survey, up from 

 24 percent in 1986 and well above the 1961 level 

 of 10 percent. And though fishing pressure re- 

 mained well below the record levels of the trout- 

 stocking 1960s, the state estimated in 1989 that 

 anglers spend SI. 2 million a year on their Rock 



