Mike Horse Creek Road will provide public access, but with hardened ford at Blackfoot

The old Mike Horse Creek Road is closed while the last of the remediation work in the Upper Blackfoot Mining Complex is completed during the next two months, but it will remain a public county road for access to public land once work is done.

The road remains intact from Highway 200 to Shaue Gulch, but the river crossing to the intersection with Meadow Creek Road was removed as part of the clean up. Four-wheel drive vehicles should be able to cross the river using a hardened ford site once the restoration work is complete. Lewis and Clark County will control access to the ford.

The future of the Mike Horse Creek Road came to the forefront in January, when the U.S. Forest Service, a partner in the UBMC cleanup effort attended a meeting of the Upper Blackfoot Valley Community Council seeking feedback from the Lincoln public.

At that meeting, the Forest Service presented several options for the future of the road: a quit claim from the county to the Forest service; abandonment of the road by the county; the county keeping the road and requesting a new bridge from the project; or the county keeping the road with a ford to cross the river.

Further public discussion on the road had been scheduled for the March UBVCC meeting, but attendance was sparse due to COVID-19 concerns, with only a couple council members and no County or Forest Service personnel in attendance. The meeting instead became a listening session. Rod Bullis, a long-time advocate for public access to public lands, presented a well-researched argument in favor of keeping the road open to the public, even if access across the river was limited to a ford.

Funding for a bridge by the UBMC cleanup partners was deemed unlikely due to the cost and the depletion of the UBMC cleanup funds

At the time of the Meadow Creek Road construction in 2009, the Forest Service believed Mike Horse Creek Road was a National Forest System road. However, during a 2015 investigation into the land ownership in the area, they discovered it was a county road from Highway 200 to just beyond the Water Treatment Plant, an area originally referred to as Silver Camp. The road dates to about the early 20th century.

Due to the amount of contaminated mine waste in the area, the section of road from Shaue Gulch across the river to the intersection with Meadow Creek Road had to be removed as part of the waste removal.

Bowers said the area near the river crossing, above a bend in the river, was referred to as the "area of concentrated tailings," and contained about 60,000 cubic yards of waste. Bowers said it was considerably more than they expected and much of it proved to be the fine "blue goo" waste from the old impoundment.

"I think what happened is, if you look at the river, it's a straight shot down here, then it turns, Dave Bowers, UBMC project manager for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, said. "I think the mud flow from the (1975 Mike Horse dam) breech surged and settled. More of it went downstream, but this corner here I think really caused a lot of it to settle."

He said earlier historic mining operations also dumped tailing in that area of the river.

Although the Mike Horse Creek Road won't be regularly maintained by the county, Bowers said efforts are being made to secure grant funding for improvements to the Water Treatment Plant powerline and the culverts at Pass Creek. During high water years, the flow from Pass Creek often overwhelms the current culverts and damages the road across the marsh.

At the May meeting of the UBVCC, Lewis and Clark County Commission Chairperson Susan Good Geise, told the UBVCC the commission will probably take under advisement what they're going to do with the road in the fall.