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This summer has been among the roughest in recent memory for many of western Montana’s rivers.
A handful of rivers, including beloved trout fisheries, reported some of the lowest July, August and September flows recorded in nearly a century of data collection. Rivers that reached or approached record lows include the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, Flathead, Clark Fork and Big Hole. Many continue to report record-low levels into October.
As I wrote this week, those low flows illustrate the increasing strain facing Montana’s legal framework for deciding what goes dry when there isn’t enough water to go around, including a lawsuit filed Aug. 8.
People I spoke with for that story used words like “grim,” “wickedly low,” “brutal” and “challenging” to describe the situation on their local rivers and reservoirs this year. Fish kills were reported on Lolo Creek and at Faber Reservoir. Reservoirs that sustain hundreds of square miles of farmland in central Montana fell to their lowest known levels, resulting in a sharp decline in hay production for many agricultural producers and effectively undoing recent fish-stocking efforts. Municipalities like Fairfield had to enact watering restrictions — hand watering of lawns, gardens, flowers and trees only, please — to ensure residents could still get water to their indoor taps. Hydropower production at the Séliš Ksanka QÍispé Dam declined as rivers that feed into it reached record-low levels and managers tried to keep water in Flathead Lake for recreationists without leaving fish below the dam in a lurch.
A lean water year generates widespread and interconnected impacts, just as a year of plenty generates widespread and interconnected impacts. It’s one of the reasons I’ve grown to love reporting on water issues, bleak as they can be. As Karli Johnson with the Montana Farm Bureau Federation told me, water management can’t be considered in a vacuum. Even if you have a usage right for the water that flows past your home or ranch, what’s there for you depends on what’s happening upstream. Similarly, what you do with that water shapes what happens to rivers, reservoirs and aquifers downgradient.
And while water rights contain specific, numeric details, the state law that governs their use is a mix of discrete directives and squishy objectives. According to the 1972 Montana Constitution, water “is the property of the state for the use of the people,” who must demonstrate that they’re putting it to “beneficial use” if they wish to claim some for themselves. The Montana Water Use Act, enacted in 1973, lays out a system for allocating water when there isn’t enough to go around and establishes a framework for encouraging other users’ compliance.
What happens when you bring all these components together in a court of law as streams outside the courthouse run dry? According to Michelle Bryan, who teaches courses on water law and property law at the University of Montana, you’re diving into some critical and complicated territory.
“I don’t envy the court trying to figure out where to begin,” she told me in a recent interview.
I don’t either. But I sure am interested to watch the proceedings unfold.
— Amanda Eggert
The Viz 📈
Montana has long been an electricity exporter. With an abundance of powerful rivers, steady wind and energy-dense coal, Montana’s natural resources have a track record of providing plenty of power to electricity consumers inside and outside the state’s borders. But as new plants come online and old plants are mothbolled, the state’s energy mix is changing — at the same time energy demand is set to grow. Significantly.
Energy observers talk about these changes in terms of “nameplate capacity” (how much power a particular plant can produce under optimal conditions) and “average generation” (the actual generation over the course of a given year, factoring in downtime and periods when the facility wasn’t producing at full power.)
Here’s how Montana’s major generating facilities are distributed across the state’s landscape:
Viewed through those metrics, our analysis of the state’s electricity production shows a few key insights:
1) Both by nameplate capacity and average generation, Colstrip’s 1,650 megawatt coal-fired power plant is the largest single electricity source in Montana. In 2024, it produced a total of 9 million megawatt-hours and averaged about 1,030 megawatt-hours in the process.
2) If you consider energy sources collectively, hydroelectric power comes out on top. Hydropower dams’ nameplate capacity collectively totals 2,611 megawatts of power. When rivers are running strong and steady, they are a good source of stable power.
3) Wind takes the cake if the metric is industry growth. Major wind projects in north-central and eastern Montana such as Clearwater and Pryor Creek have helped Montana wind surpass coal in terms of total nameplate capacity. If you include the Beaver Creek Project that came online at the end of summer 2025, wind projects in the state have a combined 2,144 megawatts of capacity. Total wind generation in 2024 topped out at 5.8 million megawatt-hours.
Those three energy sources, paired with smaller but significant contributors such as gas plants and solar arrays, help ensure that Montanans’ electricity needs are generally met by power generated inside the state’s borders. But that may not remain the case as NorthWestern Energy, Montana’s largest utility, strikes deals with power-hungry data centers looking to set up shop in Montana, projects that could dramatically boost the state’s consumption.
Enter Gov. Greg Gianforte’s Unleashing American-Made Energy Task Force, which held its first meeting in Helena on Sept. 22. Members of the task force include state regulators, utility representatives, power producers, power purchasers and a representative from a transmission company that seeks to tie the others together. They’re being asked to provide Gianforte with short- and long-term strategies to increase the state’s supply of “affordable and reliable energy options.” Next week, the state is partnering with the Montana Chamber of Commerce to host an energy-oriented roundtable that will feature many of the same stakeholders, and a few national power players (forgive the pun). There will undoubtedly be no shortage of issues to discuss.
— Amanda Eggert and Jacob Olness
Verbatim 💬
“The third way we can honor Charlie is to fall in love, get married and raise a family. … Take Charlie’s advice, and don’t miss out on God’s gift of marriage and family in your life.”
—Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, speaking during an Oct. 7 event in Bozeman honoring Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer and founder of Turning Point USA who was shot and killed in September.
Gianforte, who spoke to a crowd of thousands at the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse on Montana State University’s campus, also encouraged attendees to follow Kirk’s example by pursuing faith in God, seeking out education and understanding, and loving one’s neighbors.
Since his assassination Sept. 10, Kirk, a husband and father to two young children, has been held up by prominent Republicans as a martyr for conservative Christianity. The 31-year-old political strategist and influencer was well-known for hosting provocative conversations with students on college campuses and making provocative statements about race, gender and immigration.
READ MORE: Turning Point rally at MSU emphasizes conservatism anchored in free speech, Christian faith.
Viewshed 🌄
— Lauren Miller
By the Numbers 🔢
Acres burned by Montana wildfires this year as of Sept. 29, 2025, according to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
That figure ranks this year’s fire season as the second slowest in the last decade — a far cry from the grim prognosis for this year’s fire season shared by National Interagency Fire Center meteorologist Dan Borsum in June.
“At some point during the spring, I pulled up the forecast in May for the summer of 2021 and I compared it to this summer’s forecast, and they’re almost identical,” Borsum said. “And 2021 was a big fire year.”
But with this year’s fire season likely in its final stages, the other shoe never dropped.
The acreage figure for 2025 is an 80% drop from last year. About half of the acres that burned last summer are attributed to the Remington Fire in southeastern Montana.
Missoula-based NWS meteorologist Ryan Leach said in a Thursday interview that a low-pressure system moving in from the West Coast, expected to pass over Montana this weekend, will likely dampen the state’s remaining blazes. Less sunlight as Montana heads into fall is also dampening fires, he said.
“The sun angle gets lower in the sky, just because of the tilt to the axis of the Earth. And that actually has a really big impact — as well as the shortening days,” Leach said.
A cold weather system in early October diminished fires in western Montana, which experienced a more active fire season than the east. Statewide, only one fire larger than 1,000 acres, the roughly 2,500-acre Salmon Forks Fire in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, remained uncontained Oct. 10.
— Zeke Lloyd
Highlights ☀️
In other news this week —
- State health officials insist eastern Montana is in dire need of a facility for mental health patients who have been accused of crimes. After an initial pitch to locate it in Billings hit opposition earlier this year, a group of lawmakers and advocates there is trying to work through local concerns.
- Montana’s prison system has addressed overcrowding in recent years by paying to send male inmates to private prisons in Arizona and Mississippi. A Helena woman told MTFP that a three-night trip to visit her incarcerated brother in Arizona costs her roughly $1,400.
- Local elections are heating up around the state. We put together a guide about nine races we’re watching — and one we’re not.
On Our Radar
Amanda — Recent happy news that Bozeman writer-editor-illustrator-publisher Allen Morris Jones has been named Montana’s next Poet Laureate led me to take a spin through his Facebook page, where he frequently posts his poems, some finished, some not. It was a worthwhile endeavor, as it led me to this in-progress, untitled gem.
JoVonne — With Indigenous Peoples’ Day approaching on Oct. 13, ICT News has compiled a list of events planned across the country, including in Montana. The holiday — officially recognized by the state of Montana for the first time this year — celebrates tribal resiliency and the history of the nation’s first peoples.
Jacob — Among Bell Labs’ many innovations, none loom larger than the transistor, the technology that makes everything from pacemakers to iPhones possible. This week marks the 75th anniversary of its patenting, igniting the age of silicon and software.
Zeke —The internet has made romance seem even more fickle in the decades since the release of “When Harry Met Sally,” but the 1989 fall classic reminds us that randomness is a central part of all the best love stories.
Mara — When I take work trips, I’m always looking for an excuse to try out a new-to-me diner. Earlier this week, it was Stella’s in Billings. Next week, I’ll be driving around Kalispell and Libby — let me know the best spot(s) for hashbrowns, eggs benedict and that quintessential diner coffee.
Eric — Kids, this is why you pay attention in chemistry class.
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