Landowners seek long-term fix for erosion

Rusby Seabaugh stands at the edge of his property near Lower Valley Road on a warm August morning, peering down from the bank to the slow-moving bend along the lower Flathead River.

On the far bank, a sliver of a cottonwood grove remains along the bank. Several trees have begun leaning toward the water while the trunks of other, earlier casualties have washed up along the cut banks downstream.

“This river is totally different from what it was before Kerr Dam (recently renamed the Salish Kootenai Dam) raised the river 10 feet,” the Kalispell-based physician says. “It basically turns into an estuary.”

The lower 22 miles of the Flathead River’s main stem extend from just north of Foy’s Bend to the official boundary of Flathead Lake — although many of the property owners along the way will note that the lake effectively extends up that entire corridor when its water levels are raised in June for the summer season.

According to many of those landowners, the seasonal fill-up and draw-down cycles of Flathead Lake — wherein the pond level fluctuates by 8 to 10 feet — have eroded away vast chunks of valuable riverfront land over the years.

The Flathead River Commission consists of commissioners Steve Sekelsky, Robert Storer and former state senator Verdell Jackson, all of whom are working with property owners and various agencies find a long-term fix to the problem.

“The soil is saturated during the summer, then the water is drawn down, and without the pressure on them the banks fall apart in the fall and winter,” Sekelsky explains. “This is a really challenging river to work with, because of the energy, the flow of the river and the lake effect.”

The landowners’ concerns are just one component of Flathead River politics, which span the interests of energy production from two hydroelectric dams, endangered fish habitat, water supply and the lake recreation-dependent summer tourist season.

“You kind of have this battle between the people who want the lake to go up and the people that don’t,” says Jackson.

The river commissioners say one of the biggest obstacles is the lack of accessibility of the dam operators and agencies that could potentially tweak the policies to mitigate flooding impacts.

In 2012, a major flooding event during the spring runoff popped the river’s water level at Columbia Falls up to 13 feet, and led the National Weather Service to revise the official “flood stage” down to that level the next year, after the subsequent flooding caused agricultural losses and road closures. Jackson said afterward he attempted to explain the situation to the Army Corps of Engineers’ office in Portland, which oversees the permitting of the Hungry Horse Dam upstream.

“We explained to them that if they had held back the water for just one day, we wouldn’t have had that flood,” he said. “It’s difficult when you have someone in Portland who has the ultimate responsibility, but here, things were happening fast.”

In the absence of mitigation funding or an erosion-control agreement between the operators of the Salish Kootenai and Hungry Horse Dams, many landowners along the river have taken matters into their own hands. A trip to the lower main stem shows the variety of attempts — some more successful than others — to slow the river’s appetite for the fertile valley land.

“When I bought this place in the ’70s, this land was covered with chokecherry and riparian plants and trees,” Seabaugh remembers. “Gradually, over the years, it slumped into the river and it was clear that if we didn’t do anything this was all going to erode.”

One of the original fixes is colloquially referred to as “riprap,” although the definition has changed over the years.

The rusted, steel skeletons of muscle cars still poke through the water’s surface along the river banks, artifacts from the ’50s and ’60s when junked cars were dumped along the riverbanks to buffer the land from the water. They succeeded to an extent, but more nuanced approaches over the years have brought bigger returns.

Massive chunks of repurposed concrete were later been used to similar effect, and more recently, property owners have increasingly moved to large rocks on the bank toe, in combination with riparian restoration along their property boundaries.

Seabaugh has embraced a return to the past, replicating the native riparian stands of trees and shrubs, with a focus on those with more aggressive root systems.

Long-standing cottonwood groves have fallen, one by one, into the waters over the years, and his riverbank is now populated with successive plantings of alder, hawthorne, chokecherry, buffalo berry, lilac and apple trees. Down by the water’s edge, a barrier of natural rock slows wave action from boat wakes and helps to hold the soil in place at the bottom of the bank.

“A lot of people are opposed to the rock,” Seabaugh says. “When it’s used wrong it does look bad, but when it’s done right it can save these banks.”

Out-of-pocket restoration isn’t an option for everyone, however.

“Some landowners have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mitigation,” says Sekelsky. “A lot of people want to protect their banks, but finding out the cost the [permitting] agencies want, they can’t afford to do it.”

The commission has succeeded in obtaining some grant funding to put toward projects and community outreach, but far more is needed before Seabaugh’s model can be applied on a broader scale.

One of the main goals is to establish the lower 22 miles as a designated special management area, which could ultimately ease the cost of erosion mitigation, like riprap placement.

“If the permitting process can be streamlined, we can have the engineering already approved, so each individual landowner doesn’t have to go through the same thing over and over,” says Storer.

He adds that ultimately, these will only be partial fixes until the various stakeholders, and particularly the operators of the two dams, can sit down and agree on a strategy for minimizing the impact of the river’s annual fluctuations.

“This ideal situation would be to delay the filling of the lake a couple weeks, depending on the snowpack and what the flows of the river are,” he says. “We live in the middle and we’re trying to balance everything out ourselves.”

The Flathead River Commission meets on the third Monday of every month at 7 p.m. in the Bennett Co. Building in Kalispell. The next meeting is Sept. 21.

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.