Rolling Stone Menu The Battle for the Soul of Montana A copper mine threatens the iconic Smith River. It will bring jobs and the copper needed for a renewable-energy future, but is it worth the risk to one of the last pristine waterways?
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Geologist Jerry Zieg grew up next to the Smith River in central Montana, on the ranch his family has owned for five generations. The river irrigated their land. He learned to fish from its pristine bounty of westslope cutthroat trout. The river’s russet canyon walls, with 1,000-year-old pictographs drawn by the Besant and Avonlea peoples, were what first inspired his fascination with geology. Later, when he married his wife, the two floated the Smith for their honeymoon. “My family sold the part right on the river in the mid-Eighties, but I still have the rest of that land where I grew up on the Smith,” he says proudly.