MISSOULA — While the Clark Fork River will soon run full of frigid snowmelt, the summer sun isn't far off, nor is the mass of floaters eager to take to the water.
The Clark Fork Coalition, in partnership with the City of Missoula, on Wednesday detailed their plans to launch the River Ambassadors program again this June.
Now in its sixth year, the program looks to educate floaters in an effort to protect the resource as use increases.
“Their primary goal is to be boots on the ground, out at these access sites and working with the recreators,” said Lilly Haines, the community programs manager with the Clark Fork Coalition. “With that paid staff, we're able to consistently have a presence at 12 of our major access points on the rivers.”
On the Clark Fork, the ambassadors will cover roughly 8.5 miles from Sha-Ron and Milltown down to Silver Park and points in between. On the Bitterroot, they'll work nine miles of river from Lolo north to Kona Bridge.
“A lot of the work we do in this front-country landscape is making sure we're meeting all our goals for recreation management and resource management, and where those two combine,” said Morgan Valliant, associate director of ecosystem services at the city. “River ambassadors meet these people on the front lines where this recreation is occurring.”
Over the past few years, as the program has evolved, the city has surveyed use of the river. In 2015, the Clark Fork through the urban core logged roughly 15,000 floaters setting off from Sha-Ron to downtown Missoula.
By 2025, Valliant said, the figure had grown to 34,000 floaters over the eight-week period. Three decades ago, most of those users would have driven north to float the Blackfoot River. But recent efforts to clean the Clark Fork — including the removal of the Milltown Dam — have changed local recreational patterns.
It has also placed more pressure on the watershed.
“It has transitioned a lot of that use to the Clark Fork River,” said Valliant. “We can manage that resource. For the first time, I feel we're actually directing recreational use patterns rather than reacting to them.”
The city has also studied the conditions that typically lead to a so-called “tuber hatch,” where the river is dotted with a steady stream of floaters. The hatch occurs when the water runs between 1,000 and 3,000 cubic feet per-second and when outdoor temperatures are 85 degrees or warmer.
The season generally lasts six weeks, focused around July, Valliant said. Across the entire month, the river averages 140 tubers per hour. Use of kayaks and stand-up paddle boards are steadily increasing while drift boats and rafts remain steady.
“They have very different needs,” Valliant said of the boats and rafts. “They need a boat ramp and are taking out at specific locations. Those in a tube can get out anywhere or launch anywhere, so it really changes your tactics. Those tubers are really our primary audience.”
To hone the ambassador program, the city has also tracked river users based on attrition. On one day in July, the average saw 347 people per hour floating under the Deer Creek bridge at Sha-Ron. Nearly all of them continued down the river past Jacob's Island.
But by the time those floaters reach the beach at the Madison Street bridge, nearly 60% of them had left the river. By McCormic Park, roughly 90% of the users had left the river, leaving only a small number drifting onto the boat ramp at Silver Park.
“Basically, all those folks are taking off within a mile-and-a-half of our downtown area,” Valliant said. “It's critical data for us to have, both for resource planning and also for our outreach and education.”
The ambassadors work primarily on education and also maintain a social media account filled with best river practices, forecasts and severe-weather warnings.
This year's crop of ambassadors will work from June to mid-September,” Haines said.
“The ambassador programs looks to impact behavior and mitigate social conflict through education and outreach,” said Haines. “It's a field-based seasonal program where all the partners in the collaborative come together to set the priorities for the river ambassadors and bring in the resources we need to get the program up and running.”
