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Soda Butte Creek

Creek in Yellowstone NP, Gallatin NF, North Absaroka Wilderness, New World Mining District, Rocky Mountains in Cooke City in WY, MT

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Length

25mi

Soda Butte Creek Scenic Photographs

Buffalo Near Soda Butte Creek

Soda Butte Creek Native Fish Restoration Project (NPS)

Yellowstone National Park Native Fish Conservation Plan

In December 2010, the National Park Service prepared a park-wide Native Fish Conservation Plan. Ongoing losses in native fish populations and resultant affects to the natural food webs they support necessitated the plan. Across the park, changing precipitation patterns, combined with the lingering effects of historical and illegal stocking of non-native fish, continue to result in shifts in ecosystem function. Now, by removing the non-native fish and other non-natural components of the ecosystem, the NPS strives to restore natural ecosystem components that have been lost or degraded.

Early Soda Butte Creek Electrofishing Efforts

Yellowstone National Park has been working with partner agencies (Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks; U.S. Forest Service; and Wyoming Game and Fish) to remove the non-native brook trout from Soda Butte Creek for the past two decades. Until 2016, brook trout removal was done by electrofishing the upper portions of Soda Butte Creek, above Ice Box Canyon, and selectively removing brook trout while returning cutthroat trout back to the stream. Removal of brook trout in Soda Butte Creek by electrofishing was the proposed and adopted conservation action described in the Native Fish Conservation Plan. However, electrofishing is both labor intensive and costly and after 15 years of removal efforts, brook trout continue to expand their range downstream in Soda Butte creek.

Approved 2015 Alternative Treatment Efforts

Following the National Environmental Policy Act and Montana Environmental Policy Act protocols, the National Park Service revised its Soda Butte Creek treatment method in 2015 to apply piscicide, a substance that is poisonous to fish, to curtail further expansion of brook trout. Soda Butte Creek’s Yellowstone cutthroat fish restoration project concluded in 2016 after nonnative brook trout were completely removed from the waterway because of successful treatments.

2023 Treatment

In August, 2023 Yellowstone National Park, in coordination with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and Custer Gallatin National Forest, resumed the Soda Butte Creek Native Fish Restoration Project near the Northeast Entrance to remove newly discovered nonnative brook trout. If not removed, the September and October spawning brook trout would again start displacing native Yellowstone cutthroat trout and eventually invade the entire Lamar River watershed, threatening the largest remaining river population of Yellowstone cutthroat trout in existence.

Cutthroat trout were moved out of the treatment area in August by electroshocking and held safely in the Soda Butte Creek upper untreated watershed tributaries. A piscicide (rotenone) to remove brook trout from upper portions of the Soda Butte Creek above Ice Box Canyon was applied and, after treatment cutthroat trout were released back into Soda Butte Creek. Rotenone is toxic to gill-breathing organisms but relatively safe for humans and wildlife.

Cutthroat trout are the only trout species native to the park. They are the most ecologically important fish of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and are highly regarded by anglers. Genetically pure Yellowstone cutthroat trout populations have declined throughout their natural range in the Intermountain West, succumbing to competition with and predation by nonnative fish species, a loss of genetic integrity through hybridization, habitat degradation and predation.