Opinion: Gunsight Lake project worth pursuing

A few weeks ago the National Park Service cried uncle and gave up on a plan to introduce native fish species to Gunsight Lake in Glacier National Park.

This came as a result of what I believe was a misguided lawsuit by two environmental organizations, the Friends of the Wild Swan and Council on Wildlife. Their suit claimed that the plan was flawed and that moving endangered species like bull trout hadn’t been fully analyzed, in violation of the Endangered Species Act. They also claimed the plan didn’t fully analyze the impacts of taking bull trout from east of the divide streams, raising fry in fish hatcheries and stocking them in Gunsight.

Let’s get real.

What was the worst thing that would have happened? The stocked bull trout would have died, right? That’s the absolute worst thing and extremely unlikely.

The best thing that could have happened is the bull trout took a liking to Gunsight, munching on native whitefish and westslope cutthroat trout, which the park also had plans to stock in the lake.

I know Glacier Park biologist Chris Downs well enough to know that they had no intention of harming the native east side bull trout. 

Downs and his staff as well as biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service aren’t hacks. They’ve been studying and restoring bull trout populations for years.

Witness the success of netting efforts in Quartz Lake on the west side, or the translocation of bull trout into Grace Lake.

In Quartz biologists have been netting out non-native lake trout for years now and the bull trout populations have rebounded as a result. In Grace, biologists moved bull trout from Logging Lake upstream into Grace in order to preserve another population in a threatened drainage. (Lake trout are not native west of the divide and pretty much outcompete and eat native bull trout, even though both species are predators.)

There’s a couple of ways to restore, or at least preserve, native bull trout populations. One is to kill lake trout en masse, which isn’t easy and takes buckets of money, time and energy.

The other is to move them to lakes where there are no native lake trout like Grace and Gunsight, and (and this is very important), there is no way for lake trout to migrate into them, where they can kill off the bulls. Both Grace and Gunsight have natural waterfalls that stop upstream fish migration.

Moving bull trout to protected waters makes sense. It is economically and biologically sound. The Gunsight Lake project made sense. 

Now Gunsight Lake remains fishless, as the nonnative rainbow trout that were stocked there decades ago have been removed.

Gunsight is a beautiful place with a nice backcountry campsite. It also should have been a lasting refuge for an iconic Montana fish species.

Let’s hope Glacier takes a second look at the project. And let’s hope the environmental groups see the wisdom in the decision.