BRINGING BOZEMAN CREEK INTO THE LIGHT

ISABEL HICKS

Montana Free Press

The city’s namesake creek is subject to a network of tunnels and culverts below downtown

A band of citizens looking to revitalize the future of Bozeman Creek as it runs through the city’s downtown first looked to the past.

In the 1860s, the settlement of Bozeman, renowned for its fertile soil and ample wildlife, served as a supply hub for gold prospectors. Born in the Hyalite-area peaks of the Gallatin Range, its namesake creek meandered through downtown as both a critical water source and a nuisance.

City maps from 1870 show the Bozeman Creek of yore: sweeping S-curves that, once downtown, wound their way through side streets before splitting Main Street in two.

But as buildings were constructed, roads paved and sewer lines installed, the creek was manipulated at the expense of infrastructure. According to Bozeman’s Extreme History, some of the town’s first residents, Jacob Speith and Charles Krug, took advantage of the creek to keep beer cold when they opened Bozeman’s first brewery in 1867 at 240 E. Main St.

Today, the creek runs through downtown in a largely straight line, beholden to culverts and tunnels that force it underground. Beneath Main Street is a 420-footlong tunnel, constructed in the late 1880s, that some residents may not realize is beneath their feet.

“Over the years, we have channelized it, we have hidden it, we have neglected it, and we have made it an afterthought rather than an integral part of the community,” former Bozeman Mayor Terry Cunningham said of the creek.

A free-flowing creek, in certain respects, is a problem for a municipality, Cunningham said. It floods, it moves, it erodes banks and creates new channels in unpredictable ways.

“We purposefully made the creek more predictable,” Cunningham said. “And that predictability obviously has negative consequences for the creek itself and the surrounding environment.”

In 2026, hindsight is 20/20. The city of Bozeman, the grassroots group See Bozeman Creek and others are reckoning with how to make the creek, which provides around 40% of the city’s drinking water, resemble the stream that it once was.

“To me, that looks like taking the creek out of hiding. It means daylighting it wherever possible, increasing the ability of people of all ages to watch the creek, to touch the creek, to enjoy the creek,” Cunningham said. “…To some extent, undoing the bad deeds of the past.”

Advocates hope that piecemeal restoration of the creek will also provide ecological benefits and reduce flood risk, and citizens have been laying the groundwork for years. After art installations and advocacy drew the attention of Bozemanites, the city commission voted in 2024 to include studying Bozeman Creek on its two-year list of priorities, funding an engineering study and consulting work.

The ultimate effort — the Bozeman Creek Vision Plan — is a slate of ideas for consideration to be implemented in phases across several decades, say See Bozeman Creek co-founders Steve Nobel and Jim Madden.

In January, the city awarded a $150,000 contract to PORT, an urban planning consulting firm, to develop ideas for flood mitigation and creek restoration.

On June 2, PORT presented ideas for community feedback at an event at Soroptomist Park downtown, which is near where the creek tunnels under Main Street. Henderson estimated a few hundred people stopped by to peruse maps, proposed ideas and write their thoughts on provided sticky notes. The ideas are also posted on the city of Bozeman’s website for consideration.

The event, in part, sought to inform the public about the flood risk.

In 2025, the city contracted Bozeman- based Allied Engineering Services to do a preliminary engineering and flood capacity report for Bozeman Creek. It cost $48,000, with $40,000 from the Montana Department of Commerce’s Coal Endowment Program and $8,000 from the Downtown Urban Renewal District.

Existing infrastructure along the downtown, 1.8-mile stretch of Bozeman Creek, from south of Ice House Park to Interstate 90 — some installed in 2018 and some dating back 150 years — is insufficient to withstand a 100-year flood, the engineers found. And the cost of fixing it now is less than the future cost of doing nothing.

Especially in light of the 2022 floods that roiled southwest Montana, “we want to make sure we’re thinking about how rain-on-snow events need to be considered,” said Jon Henderson, Bozeman’s assistant city manager. “Or what I would refer to as a modern view of a real flood potential.”

The report recommends repairing or removing around 20 structures (culverts, tunnels and bridges) so that the creek can withstand flows surging to 1,250 cubic feet per second (cfs), which is slightly above those anticipated during a 100-year flood.

Engineers estimated that the 120-yearold tunnel under Main Street could withstand flows up to 622 cfs, and expanding it would cost an estimated $1.5 to $2.5 million. But if nothing is done, those same projections suggest that 54 downtown structures could be inundated with over a foot of water in the worst-case scenario.

Bozeman Creek emerges from underneath Main Street at this tunnel outside Bar IX’s patio. The steep, fenced-in banks are common for the creek’s downtown corridor, hindering public access.

ISABEL HICKS/MTFP

“This tunnel is a bottleneck and exacerbates flooding in the downtown Bozeman area,” the report said. “There is concern that the tunnel could fail.”

“When we look at the price tag of some of the fixes, we have to recognize that they are high, but the alternative is even more costly,” said Cunningham. His term ended in January, but he remains involved in the creek restoration.

It’s not unheard of for Bozeman residents to be unfamiliar with the creek. Tyler Gutierrez, who moved from Jackson in 2024, said he had no idea that Bozeman Creek ran through downtown until recently. He heard about the See Bozeman Creek event on social media and was curious to attend.

More Bozemanites now might be aware of Bozeman Creek, thanks to an Instagram video posted recently by Chad Dokken. It shows him on a paddleboard traveling the creek through downtown — mostly through the dark tunnels. Only a few seconds of the video show Dokken in daylight, demonstrating to the more than 110,000 viewers how the vast majority of the creek downtown has been rerouted underground.

PORT has proposed a slate of ideas to reduce the risk of flooding downtown and bring the creek above ground, an aesthetic goal of See Bozeman Creek and others.

Those preliminary concepts included restoring the creek to its natural floodplain in Bogart Park, a few blocks south of downtown, which would involve relocating the park pavilion that is also used as a winter ice rink. Another idea — creating a creekside park south of Main Street — would require removing a free city parking lot.

Expanding the creekside park already adjacent to City Hall, north of Main Street, and removing a parking lot there is another idea. The concept included the construction of another parking garage west of City Hall.

Many of the people who attended the June event left feedback questioning whether removing parking or structures was necessary and strongly supported starting work on cityowned property, while others praised the potential closure of roads and the reduction in car dependency.

Discussing tradeoffs she believes the Bozeman community will face as the ideas take shape, City Commissioner Emma Bode said the work will be expensive. She added that she hopes downtown businesses will see the work to improve the creek as an asset. Flooding downtown is bad for businesses, while additional green spaces and parks in the area will likely help businesses, she said.

Madden, with See Bozeman Creek, echoed that involving private property owners in the work will be critical, adding that the easier, least costly work will be on property the city already owns.

“There is a lot of city-owned property along the creek, and there’s a lot of privately-owned property along the creek. Particularly in this early stage, it’s a really delicate tap dance,” said Madden. “We don’t want to be saying, okay, we could grab this person’s land and run the creek through it. However, there will be identified in the vision plan what is the low-hanging fruit that could be done relatively soon.”

Public access to the creek is a motivator for Rachel Hughes, a former hydraulic technician for the U.S. Geological Survey who moved to Bozeman from Helena last year. She now manages the Instagram account for See Bozeman Creek.

If the city creates an easier way for people to interact with the creek, Hughes said, more people will care about it.

“I think it’s a huge disservice to Bozeman and to the creek that we covered it up,” Hughes said.

Now, the groups will consider the community feedback and fine-tune ideas for another presentation timed to coincide with Bozeman’s Sweet Pea Festival in early August.

Come fall, PORT consultants will present a plan for stakeholders to consider, and in December, they will present a handful of priority projects and cost estimates to the city commission.

Nobel, of See Bozeman Creek, described the June event as a “Broadway opening” that kicked off the creek’s future.

It commenced “the process of discovering what that vision could be based on the community’s input and support,” Nobel said. Before, “it was just kind of out of sight, out of mind, and with an ever-mounting number of critical short-term priorities.”