A federal judge told the U.S. Forest Service that a plan to kill rainbow trout and replace them with native Yellowstone cutthroat trout along a 45-mile stretch of waterways in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness violates federal law.
U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy granted summary judgment in favor of the conservation group Wilderness Watch, which sued the Forest Service in 2023, alleging the agency’s plan violated several provisions of the Wilderness Act.
“The Wilderness Act is not simply a procedural hurdle that can be overcome by considering all the relevant factors that bear on wilderness character,” Molloy wrote in a decision last week. “To the contrary, the Act dictates the outcome; wilderness areas ‘shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness.’”
Molloy’s decision came down in opposition to findings that favored the Forest Service offered by a magistrate judge following a hearing last December, reports the Daily Montanan, after which Wilderness Watch moved for summary judgment.
“This is one of the most important rulings for protecting the integrity of the Wilderness Act in the law’s 60-year history,” Wilderness Watch Executive Director George Nickas said in a statement. “The idea that managers can substitute their desired conditions for what nature provides in these wild places threatens to destroy the profound values that set wilderness areas apart. Judge Molloy’s thoroughly reasoned order spells out precisely why the agency’s misguided aims are fundamentally at odds with the law. Every manager who oversees wilderness needs to read and understand it.”
The Buffalo Creek Project was a partnership between the Forest Service, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and Yellowstone National Park and would have involved 46 stream miles and 11 surface acres of a lake in the wilderness area to the north of Yellowstone Park. The project’s goal was to remove populations of non-native rainbow trout from the system, which the state had introduced nearly a century ago, and replace them with Yellowstone cutthroat.
Under the plan approved by the Forest Service, crews would be allowed to build multiple remote field camps, use helicopters to deliver thousands of pounds of gear and fish poison rotenone into the wilderness, build and use a radio repeater in the wilderness, put fish barriers at Hidden Lake, and use the rotenone for up to five years in the creek drainage and on wetlands.
Up to 60 days of motorized use and up to 81 aircraft landings were approved as part of the plan, which the Forest Service cited as necessary due to the remoteness of the area.
Wilderness Watch, a Missoula-based conservation nonprofit, said that cutthroat trout are also not native to the upper parts of the drainage, and the use of fish poison, helicopters and motorized equipment posed clear violations of the Wilderness Act.
The project “unlawfully elevates managers’ desired outcomes above the Wilderness Act’s ‘untrammeled’ mandate,” the lawsuit stated, saying the plan authorized “a stunning amount of intensive motorized and mechanical intrusions” that are normally prohibited activities in designated wilderness.
Wilderness Watch also argued that the decision to swap out fish species was selected because of the downstream benefits — for fisheries and recreation outside the wilderness boundary.
“The Forest Service selected the most wilderness-degrading alternative … to pursue speculative conservation outcomes outside the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness,” court documents state. They also argue that as the Buffalo Creek watershed, among the upper reaches of the Yellowstone River system, was historically fishless, the wilderness area does not need the species for ecological balance or to preserve the wilderness character.
Molloy also wrote in his decision that Wilderness Watch correctly argued that the Forest Service failed to consider the fish stocking portion of its plan — separately from the work to poison and remove the rainbow trout — and the potential impact on the wilderness.
One potential alternative option for the agency to consider would have stopped after killing the nonnative rainbow trout, leaving the area bereft of trout.
Molloy rejected the findings of Magistrate Judge Kathleen Desoto and ultimately determined that the Forest Services’ plan ran counter to the protections of the Wilderness Act.
“Recognizing the incredible impacts these prohibited activities would have on the wilderness area, the Forest Service determined in its Minimum Requirements Decision Guide that the Project would have an overall negative impact on wilderness character,” Molloy said. “But the agency concluded that the Project complied with the Wilderness Act anyway. Because that decision ‘runs counter to the evidence before the agency,’ it is arbitrary and capricious.”
