Missoula to Butte: The Clark Fork Corridor

Missoula sits at the confluence of five river valleys, which is the geographic reason a city exists here. The Clark Fork River flows through the center of town, and the mountain walls of the Rattlesnake, the Bitterroot, and the Blackfoot valleys converge on this flat bottom. The Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d'Oreilles peoples held this river system and the surrounding mountains for generations.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes now hold the Flathead Reservation, which sits about thirty miles north of Missoula in the Mission Valley. The reservation contains Flathead Lake, the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi in the contiguous United States. The Clark Fork River that flows through Missoula is downstream from the Berkeley Pit in Butte, which you will reach in about an hour's drive east.

The river has been on the Superfund list. The restoration efforts upstream have been extensive and ongoing for thirty years, and the river ecology has improved significantly, fish returned to stretches that had been biologically dead. Missoula is a university city with an outdoor culture that dominates its public identity: the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area is walkable from downtown.

The drive east on Interstate Ninety toward Butte follows the Clark Fork through increasingly dramatic canyon country. The canyon walls close in as you approach the Continental Divide. Deer Lodge, halfway between Missoula and Butte, has the state prison and a car museum side by side, which says something about the randomness of small-town American tourism economies.