Restoration progress on Montana’s Clark Fork River owes much to Will McDowell. Will came to Missoula in 1998 after ten years of leading projects on irrigation, soil conservation, and parks protection in Bolivia, El Salvador, and the southwestern US. That experience provided a deep understanding of social dimensions within natural resource restoration practice. To quote his colleagues, “[h]e understood intuitively that there are no solo acts when it comes to conservation, and that the success…would hinge on relationships with landowners, community involvement, and partnerships with diverse stakeholders.”

From 1999 until 2008 Will was the Coordinator of the Voluntary Nutrient Reduction Program, a multi-partner effort to control nutrient pollution and nuisance algae from the Clark Fork headwaters to the Idaho border. Key projects resolved nutrient pollution issues at three Bitterroot dairies and with multiple landowners in the sediment-impaired Threemile watershed.

From 2009 to his recent retirement in December 2023, Will served as the Clark Fork Coalition’s first Stream Restoration Director, building a new program that grew from scratch, within three years, into a five-person staff covering the Upper Clark Fork, Bitterroot, and Missoula valley-Middle Clark Fork. Using the motto “rewater, reconnect, and restore,” the CFC’s restoration team tackled instream flow, fish passage, water quality and riparian restoration projects based on a system of priority tributaries coordinated with state agencies. By 2023, the restoration team had added over 100 cfs of flow to 16 critical stream segments, removed dozens of fish passage barriers on irrigation systems and US Forest Service roads, installed 12 fish screens, including some of the largest screens in the Clark Fork system, reconnected five tributaries in the Upper Clark Fork, and four in the Bitterroot to mainstem habitat, and improved riparian habitat along miles of degraded tributary streams on private lands.

Will worked with the National Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife, and Montana FWP to start the Montana Beaver Working Group and create Montana’s first ever Beaver Management Plan, always a champion of this “ecosystem engineer’s” ability to improve aquatic health. In 2021 Will helped start the Grant Creek Working Group to work in Missoula’s urban environment on stream restoration, resulting in a unique City-County-Conservation District agreement to coordinate on long-term restoration and reconnection of Grant Creek.

He also partnered with Five Valleys Audubon, the MT Natural History Center, and the Univ. of Montana promote the idea of a “Fort Missoula Natural Area” along a 4-mile stretch of the Bitterroot corridor. That corridor includes unique wildlife habitat and environmental education opportunties on the edge of Missoula, with the work ongoing today.

Will’s dedication to healthy stream ecosystems, both in Montana and beyond, has been to the benefit of residents, native fish and wildlife, critical habitat, and of course, the watersheds that support all of it. His contributions earned him the Arnold Bolle award in 2024.

Biography by Kalle Fox and Will McDowell