After going without a manager for five months, the Powell Clarks Fork Conservation District has been relaunching its efforts to assist landowners and promote conservation.

“We’re rising up from kind of a tough time,” said Teresa Stone, who took over as the district’s manager in March.

As one example, the Powell/Clark district recently resumed its regular sampling and monitoring of Bitter Creek and the Shoshone River.

“Bitter Creek really needs monitoring,” Stone told Park County commissioners on Sept. 1. “It has a lot going on over there.”

The creek begins west of Powell, meanders north of town and then flows near Garland before eventually dumping into the Shoshone in Big Horn County. It’s been listed by the Wyoming Department of Environmental as an impaired water body for years, due to the elevated levels of E. coli and fecal coliform.

“It’s really the E. coli that is the bad bacteria, and there we suspect there's a trend throughout the year,” Stone said. “So we try to test before irrigation, during irrigation, and after irrigation.”

In late August, Stone said the water around the start of the creek, near the Crestview Subdivision, had about 150 colony-forming units (cfu) per 100 milliliters of water. That’s OK, as the Environmental Protection Agency generally considers anything below 320-410 to be relatively safe for recreation.

However, down toward the Park/Big Horn county line, testing put the E. coli concentration at around 600 cfu per 100 mL.

At that level, “there shouldn’t be people in the water,” Stone said. “You could get sick from a cut, definitely sick from wading [and] God forbid you slip and have immersion.”

She called it a significant concern for the Powell community. The district doesn’t have any steady funding to speak of, and Stone said it was lucky to get a grant to cover the cost of monitoring Bitter Creek. They also got a hand from other entities, like the neighboring Cody and Shoshone conservation districts, who donated water testing chemicals to replace ones that expired while the organization was without a manager.

Stone said the Powell district also continues to help landowners who are preparing to subdivide their property or who are seeking to improve their wells or irrigation systems.

“... kind of our thing is to be the people to call when nobody knows who to call, and we try to tell them who to call,” she said.

This fall, the Powell Clarks Fork Conservation District is planning to again cohost a crash course for rural landowners. The one-day workshop covers a wealth of information, from planting crops to managing weeds to proper grazing.

Park County commissioners agreed to give the Powell district $4,000 to help offset the cost of the event and other educational programming.

Commissioners generally don’t like to award special funding requests after budget time, but the board had indicated in April that it would consider funding for the Powell/Clark district, then never revisited the topic.

In supporting the request, Commissioner Lloyd Thiel noted that the county provides free office space to the Cody district and he called the Powell district “a great organization.”

Commissioner Scott Mangold mentioned that he’s fielded a couple calls from people who just moved to the area and wanted to know “how to turn on their irrigation.”

“I said, ‘Don’t touch anything … get a hold of these people at the conservation district, and they have seminars, and they will give you an idea on what to do,’” Mangold recalled. “With a lot of new people moving to the area, I think their service does a great amount of good in Park County, and especially in the Powell area.”

This year’s Small Acres Workshop is scheduled for Nov. 14, with more details to follow.