Stream Doctor

Many entrepreneurs have a pioneer's spirit, but Rich McIntyre was literally in the wilderness when he found his calling. Fly-fishing on the banks of Montana's Gallatin River in 1977, McIntyre, then a 23-year-old landscaper, noticed brown trout thrashing about in a muddy stream bed nearby, trying to clear silt from the bottom so they could lay eggs on clean gravel. Deciding to help the fish reproduce and make some money for himself, he became America's first commercial stream doctor.

For fees of up to $50,000 a mile, McIntyre has worked with wealthy landowners, anglers and developers to rehabilitate streams that became barren of trout, whose eggs die if covered with silt. His firm, Timberline Reclamations, based in Bozeman, Mont., has worked on 130 projects in 17 states and has attracted a small school of competitors with names like InterFluve and Stream Team.

A stream doctor's task involves more than dredging muck. Surgery for a silty waterway can mean adding rocks, moving boulders or placing trees in strategic places to shelter trout. It often requires rechanneling a creek to increase its flow so that water will once again ripple over rocks to provide enough oxygen. At Boise's River Run development, McIntyre dug pools and meandering bends into an existing brook and added rocks and Douglas fir logs to the riverbank. Now trout spawn in streams that flow between condominium town houses and $100,000 homesites.

Stream doctoring has been practiced for years by wildlife officials in public parks, but it took McIntyre's hard-driving sense of promotion to help convince developers that a working trout stream could enhance the value of their real estate properties. Starting with small projects around Bozeman, McIntyre began advertising in fly-fishing magazines and putting out brochures describing his work. He has rehabilitated a stream for an oil-company retreat in Pennsylvania, studied a river in New York's Catskill Mountains and designed a trout environment for the Milwaukee Zoo.

But McIntyre is no longer the biggest fish in the industry pond. His rivals are crowding him. Timberline was earning $500,000 a year before four employees left to form InterFluve in Bozeman in 1984. Another recent start-up, Jim Walsh's Stream Team in Longmont, Colo., has begun hooking big contracts like a six-year job Walsh has with the A Bar A guest ranch in southern Wyoming, rehabilitating a creek that flows into the North Platte River.

McIntyre has had to cut fees and staff since 1982. Now he plans to sell Timberline and join forces with an environmental consulting firm so he can concentrate on stream doctoring rather than administration. Meanwhile, the industry he founded is thriving. Clients like A Bar A Manager Bob Howe are satisfied with the work that stream doctors do. Says he: "Our guests are surprised this has been handled by man because it's so natural looking. That's the main reason people come to the ranch." And avid fly-fishermen who have turned into stream doctors find that they can live and talk trout every day, instead of just on two-week vacations.