Rural Montana county finds unique way to share its groundwater
A view of Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Montana, between the Missouri River and the Canadian border. (Photo courtesy Jamieson Scott / USFWS)
The Big Muddy Creek flows through dams and diversions, pictured on the right, that are managed by the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge to fill the lake as needed. (Photo courtesy Keely Larson)
The vertical white cylinder is one of many that Amy Yoder with the Sheridan County Conservation District checks throughout the growing season. She opens up the top, connects the data logger inside to a laptop and collects information on the aquifer water level and how much water has been used for irrigation. (Photo courtesy of Keely Larson)
The Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge is home to the third largest pelican breeding ground in the country and the largest in Montana. Negotiations with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, helped Sheridan County Conservation District obtain the water reservation for the Clear Lake Aquifer. (Photo courtesy of Keely Larson)
Rodney Smith’s pivot is the largest connected to the aquifer. The structure in the foreground remains stationary, while the rest on wheels moves around — pivots around — the fixed structure. (Photo courtesy of Keely Larson)
Sheridan County county’s conservation district started studying its groundwater in 1978, before state monitoring began. (Photo courtesy of Keely Larson)
From left to right, Jeff Wivholm, Marlowe Onstead and Amy Yoder look through maps of irrigation pivots and aquifer allocations inside the Sheridan County Conservation District office in Plentywood. (Photo courtesy Keely Larson)
Jeff Wivholm isn’t partial to mountains. He likes to be able to see the weather rolling in, something remarkably possible in the northeastern corner of Montana.
On a cold January morning, Wivholm drives the dirt roads between farms in Sheridan County, where he’s lived for all his 63 years, with practiced ease, pointing out different plots of land by who owns them. And if he doesn’t know the family name, Amy Yoder with the Sheridan County Conservation District or Brooke Johns with the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge — both sitting in the backseat of his truck — can supply it.
If you look to the right there, Wivholm says, you can see the valley created by the aquifer. Maybe he can, his eyes accustomed to seeing dips and crevasses in, to an unfamiliar eye, a starkly flat landscape. He laughs and says it takes some getting used to.
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