Community Perspective: Investing in the Future of Our Bitterroot Waters

A conversation with Dan Kerslake, Owner and Operator of Kerslake Ranch in Stevensville, MT; Father and Husband; Supervisor with the Bitterroot Conservation District; Friend of the Bitterroot Water Partnership. Photos taken by students from MAPS Media Institute.

Alex: How has water shaped your life and experiences in the Bitterroot?

Dan: Everything we do, our lifeblood in a sense, day to day, agriculturally, is surrounded by water. Without water, our lands aren’t productive, our crops aren’t productive, our livestock don’t thrive, and therefore our families don’t thrive. In a sense, our entire community doesn’t thrive… Everything we do revolves around the waters that are provided by our rivers, our streams, our mountains, our snowpack, our springs. So it’s intricately tied to day to day survival, and feeding our children, and paying our bills, and providing good quality of life and employment for the employees that work for us, and their families.

WATER IS CONNECTED

Alex: What values or principles guide your views on water management?

Dan: Heritage. Lifeblood. Being surrounded by water, and having respect for that water, and all the things that come with it. The wildlife, the things I get to see day to day, whether that’s ducks, beavers, the habitat this water provides. And it provides us the resource for agriculture and domestic use for our home.

And I guess that hits home to me equally as deep as the water we’re using to grow our crops and money to feed our families. It’s such a wide-reaching aspect here; it makes this Valley really productive in so many ways. It makes wildlife productive, fisheries productive. We’re renowned for our fisheries here. We’re renowned for the amount of irrigated acreage this county has.

Alex: So you appreciate the connectedness of our waters and how important it is for all aspects of productivity in the Bitterroot. And through understanding how water influences so many areas, you want to take care of those other areas, too. And what you do here affects all of that.

Dan: It does have that massive effect. And that’s something that’s very apparent to me in our use of water daily. I know for a fact that the water [upstream irrigators] use, say, up above, aquifer-wise, is the same water we reuse down below. We’ve seen those studies. We’ve watched that happen.

That water then passes clear through Lee Metcalf, onto the Bitterroot River, and on for recreation, on for power consumption and usage in the hydroelectric dams that Bonneville has, and on the Columbia River Basin. I would say the Bitterroot Valley is the head of the pyramid and probably one of the most important parts of it. So, protecting our water resources is of utmost importance.

SHARED BELIEFS: taking care of WATER IN THE BITTERROOT

Alex: Are there specific values or beliefs about water you believe are shared among people in the Bitterroot Valley?

Dan: Water here is used in so many different ways. We each have our own view of what is most valuable to us with the use of water. Whether that is like: water is only for fly fishing, water is only for boating, water is only for riparian habitat, only for fisheries.

But, at the core heart of that: water quality, quantity, and stewardship is at the heart of all those people’s thinking.

You know, whether that’s me turning on a pump or me diverting water out of a stream to irrigate, I want stewardship of quantity and quality of that water. I don’t want to go irrigate with water that’s harmful to my croplands, my cattle, or to my children, or stuff that I touch every day.

I’m in this, I’m immersed in this. It’s part of me. I don’t want water that has poor quality, whether that’s toxins, heavy metals, high nitrates. You can say the same for somebody that enjoys aquatic habitat in the riversides, or watching ducklings flourish during the spring. Their idea of quality of water, quantity of water, stewardship of water is the same as mine, it’s just for a different purpose. All in all we still have that same goal in mind.

It’s keeping that water protected, keeping it plentiful, and making sure we don’t ruin it, because once we lose it, we can’t get it back. We’ve seen throughout Montana, with Bozeman and Kalispell especially, those agricultural lands have been paved over, we’re never getting those back. Water is no different.

Once we lose it, once we degrade it, once we alter it, the cost and the effort to rehabilitate that is almost impossible… if not impossible.

RESPECT GROWTH, PLAN FOR WISE WATER USE

Alex: What are your main concerns, or observations about the quality, availability, and or management of water resources in the valley?

Dan: That’s an awesome question right now, in such a time of change.

More people. We live in a majestic area. There’s a reason people want to live here. But with that comes more houses, more septics, more wells. All of those things change quantity, quality, time and use of water. Whether that’s water for our homes domestically water for irrigation, whether that’s water for our stock, fish, wildlife, habitat. I think that’s the major concern: if you look 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when my children are old, what’s that going to look like?

The challenge for us is to mitigate [pressures from people who want to live here]. How do we maintain that water quality [for all our uses] but still have that growth?

I’m not silly, I know we all need a place to live, and I know people want to live here, and I don’t want people to not live here because growth is healthy, it creates tax base, better schools, better roads, better opportunities, better businesses. Business and growth will keep our children here, whereas historically working and living here was daunting for people graduating.

I respect growth, but when it comes to water we have to strategically plan growth and water use. Because once it’s gone, we’re not getting that back.

WATER STORAGE IN THE BITTERROOT

Alex: We’ve spoken a lot about the importance and challenge of keeping more water in the Bitterroot, for the Bitterroot. What else would you add about the importance of water storage?

Dan: On a bad year, we rely on snowpack. And we have certain amounts of storage here… You have Painted Rocks, Lake Como, Wilderness lakes on the West Side.

In our drainage, the Burnt Fork, this is a huge area that drains a tremendous amount of forest land, or drains our snow storage. But on a year like this year, where we have limited snowpack, we can only store so much, and our storage is not enough for us in this drainage to get through a year. It’s not.

We’re going to be faced with water shortages sooner this year. Moving forward, the task of creating water storage [is critical], whether that’s large lakes, reservoirs, some capacity to store snowpack that would otherwise melt off fast, rage our rivers, blow our streams out but then be gone, downstream and out of our Valley.

Storage is beneficial for all uses. A slow let out of water through an entire season of summer is better for fisheries, it’s better for aquatic habitat, it’s better for recreation. It’s better for every player that is involved with water, agriculture included.

I’ve watched the Burnt Fork alone lose 500 CFS, 1,000 CFS a day during high water, and within weeks, our creeks are dwindled to nothing. We lost all that.

If we had some capacity to save even a portion of it, and let that out equally over a summer, our groundwater aquifers would be better, our crops would be better, our livestock would be healthier, the pressure on certain lands would be lessened. Overall land use would be better, the fisheries would be healthier, the water temperatures would be lower. We just go from these extremes here right now, and that’s due to lack of storage capacity.

We go from massive high water flows to almost nothing in river streams. A lot of these streams dry up because we don’t have storage. That’s not healthy for ag, it’s not healthy for recreation, it’s not healthy for wildlife.

If we don’t figure that out and we continue to move towards a warmer, drier climate, we’re going to see decreases in ag land. We’re going to see a decrease in food production. Fisheries quality, we’re going to lose things that matter to us here, and we won’t have that to pass on to the next generation.

I hope we figure that out.

This interview was captured for a traveling exhibit on ‘Our Waters, Our Ways of Life’. Visit the exhibit from April – December 2025 at the Ravalli County Museum.