Lake owners

Now that the city of Whitefish has annexed nearly 51 square miles of lake water, it has taken on some new types of responsibilities. Not just the ones discussed at council — policing open-container laws on boats and duck hunting inside city limits — but protecting the city's brand new property from pollution.

This week, the Pilot reports on numerous threats Whitefish Lake faces from unchecked commerce and development. Some of these are not new — boat traffic is an age-old problem in popular recreation lakes across the country, and preventing sediment runoff from construction sites is a simple matter of following existing best management practices.

Saving Whitefish Lake from an invasion of zebra mussels, however, is like saving open land from spotted knapweed. To understand what that means, take a stroll around Whitefish, or take a hike in the Flathead's surrounding mountainsides, and see how much knapweed has spread.

Rivers in some of the nation's hardest hit metropolitan areas have recovered from a century of industrial pollution, so it's not expecting too much for the Whitefish River to do the same.

But first we have to take a long hard look at what we're doing to the lake and its river now.