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your homegrown newspaper October 15, 2025
Vol. 22, No. 6
‘Dead, dry rivers’: Lawsuit challenges state's river management
Direct Entry Program pg. 6
Environmental groups raise public trust doctrine claims in lawsuit after the Blackfoot, Big Hole and Bitterroot rivers hit record lows. By by Amanda Eggert, Montana Free Press
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Full-tuition scholarship pg. 8
Sports pg. 15
raham Coppes entered the spring hopeful. Despite a slow start to winter, most western Montana river basins were reporting a near-average snowpack by April. But when warm May temperatures brought an underwhelming runoff, Coppes knew it would be a long, difficult summer for aquatic ecosystems and the $1.3 billion recreational economy they support. Slow-motion alarm set in as Coppes, a Missoula-based attorney, watched one blue-ribbon river after another dip to record lows. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which forecasted the difficult summer
CHRIS BOYER / LIGHTHAWK.ORG PHOTO
Stretches of the Upper Blackfoot River, pictured here on Sept. 27, 2025, dried up completely amid a persistent drought centered over west-central Montana.
ahead in June, responded by partially or fully closing more than a dozen rivers to fishing after they reached low streamflow thresholds and high temperatures that can endanger trout. In a lawsuit filed on Aug. 8, Coppes argued
that FWP should have done more for iconic rivers such as the Blackfoot, Clark Fork and Big Hole to benefit the fish that live in them and the broader Montana public. Since then, rivers have remained at record lows, and Coppes told w w w.va l le yj our na l.net
Montana Free Press in a recent conversation that the future is going to be “pretty bleak” for Montana’s aquatic ecosystems unless the state starts using and enforcing its water rights and reservations to bolster instream flows more assertively
and proactively. Guy Alsentzer with Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, says FWP is choosing politics over science, even as rivers are “diminished and see page 2