By Scout Noble
This summer I had the great privilege of interning with the Blackfoot Challenge. For a young person who cares deeply about cultivating a reciprocal relationship with the outdoors and wants to pursue a career in ecology and environmental conservancy, this summer was an incredible opportunity to learn the many moving parts of the Blackfoot’s collaborative and community-based approach to conservation. Setting out for Montana at the end of May, I was not sure what to expect. So, as with any good adventure, I packed my backpack and hit the road.
My trusty daypack came with me every day on the drive into the Blackfoot watershed; now, nearing the end of August, it has become a catalogue of experiences and memories from this summer. There is a pair of Jason brand binoculars in the left-side pocket of my backpack. I can remember using them to scan miles of lush wetlands up by Lincoln with Elaine, searching for a nest of trumpeter swan cygnets. When binoculars did not work, we knelt in the grass on the edge of the highway and used a drone to find the little family, which was hiding five healthy cygnets among willows. In the right-side pocket is a canister of bear spray, given to me my first week on the job. Eric, Alyssa and I once spent an evening in the sculpture park teaching a group of new-to-towners how to use and carry bear spray, a refresher I felt very grateful for when I came across a mother sow and her two cubs while hiking in Glacier a few weeks later. In the main pocket of my bag is a small, laminated guide to the biocontrol of invasive weeds, graciously gifted to me by Karen in my first month after I had pestered her with questions about the new arrival of houndstongue-devouring weevils in the valley. Brad, Karen and I spent a number of days on the Blackfoot Community Conservation Area this summer, surveying weeds and native biodiversity, and of course, looking for weevils.
The most-used inhabitant of my backpack this summer though, was a tablet to help Marley with recreation data collection. Every other day in July (and every third day in June), I drove through the Blackfoot valley, getting a sense of who was using it, and where. I talked to anglers, rafters, and plain old rivergoers about their experiences on and around the river. I drove alongside the river on beautiful, sunny days when kids and dogs weaved through bright kayaks piled in the parking lots, and on cool, rainy days, when lone anglers stood out in their waders on the shore. I watched new rocks emerge as the river level waned over the course of the summer and noted the often overflowing parking lots and sometimes overflowing dumpsters. I hope that the data (both quantitative and qualitative) I gathered this summer can help the Challenge, and the community it serves, calibrate for the future of recreation in the watershed. Recreation is a uniquely human element of conservation. Over and over when I asked people what their main motivation for being out on the river was, they answered, to get outside and to connect with people we care about. In an age of social disconnect, the stickers we hand out at the office read, “the river connects us all.”
There are so many more stories that bag could tell: river data collection with Clancy, wandering around prescribed burn sites with Cindy, doodles of spotted knapweed in the margins of my notebook. I have been involved with a number of environmental organizations in my lifetime; there are few that are as committed and warmly associated with the community they serve as the Challenge. As I head out into the wide world of environmental work, I hope to take with me the values of openness, curiosity, and care that I see reflected here, both within the staff, the agencies, the landowners, and the community at large. When I drove I-90 east toward Missoula at the beginning of the summer, I did not know what large and wonderful community was waiting to welcome me there. In truth, this internship turned out to be a microcosm of a lot of what the Challenge does: it was at times both complex and inspiring and usually involved a good bit of hard work.