New Butte-made documentary a portrait of the rivers that run through it

Last year Robert Lester — along with this cousin Braxton Mitchell — sailed a canoe from the headwaters of the Clark Fork River in Butte, Montana, to the Pacific Ocean, spitting out of the Columbia River in Astoria, Oregon. The expedition covered 1,276 miles, took 52 days, involved 175+ miles of portages around 19 dams and traversed four states and two countries.

And that might've been the easy part.

Shortly after Lester hit the ocean last July, he got to work on a documentary about the expedition. That film, "Columbia River Canoe Project," is showing at the Babcock Theatre in Billings at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Lester, who is something of a professional adventurer, sharing highlights on an Instagram page that boasts over 20,000 followers , knew he wanted to make a documentary from the start.

"I called some friends who I've worked with on skiing and climbing projects who were videographers and said, 'Hey, we're doing this trip,'" he remembered. "I think it'll be something worth shooting."

He was right, and said four different videographer friends tagged along for parts of the journey. They shot the thing guerrilla style, figuring it out as they went.

"We didn't have a shot list or anything," Lester explained. "We just let them go ahead of us and shoot what they wanted. That's why it turned out so good, because we didn't have to tell these guys, who are so talented and creative, exactly what they had to do."

At the end of every day Lester and Mitchell would do on camera recaps of the day's events, much of which is used as voiceover for the final film.

They had cameras running all day for 52 days, meaning that once the trip got done the editing started. Lester did a lot of that himself, and is credited on the final film as producer and co-director, sharing that title with Utah-based filmmaker Neil Larson.

"I did a little bit of everything, as you can imagine," Lester laughed.

Managing rapids and trying to dry off in camp comes easy to Lester, but he had to really work to get into filmmaker mode. It's one thing to do this, it's a whole new thing to gain the confidence to share it.

"We paddled for 10 hours a day for 50 days," Lester said. "I was nervous about making sure this isn't just a viewer watching us paddle for 45 minutes."

Larson cut the footage down to four hours, and worked with Lester to trim it down to it's current runtime of 65 minutes.

The finished product flows like the rivers it features, picking up and ebbing down at parts, but never dragging. Rivers always get where they need to go.

Maybe water comes so naturally to Lester because of where he's from. He's a Butte native and still lives there, meaning water runs in his blood. Few cities in the West are more associated with the stuff.

And while "Butte water" is something of a punchline now — there's a video compilation of famously loquacious former Montana Tech football coach Bob Green that goes viral every year or so where he quips that he likes Butte water because "you can eat and drink at the same time" — but dig past the snark and you'll find a complex relationship between Butte's mineral wealth and the water it necessitated and polluted that stretches back centuries.

Butte's big tourist attraction is an artificial lake of water so poisonous they shoot fireworks and drones at birds to keep them from landing on it, and the groundwater is a sort of oceanic blue that looks more like Gatorade than tap water.

Still the headwaters of the Clark Fork, which eventually flows into the Columbia to become the Northwest's most prominent watery artery, gets its start in Butte. Today that's Silver Bow Creek, which is where Braxton and Lester launched their expedition. But once upon a time the headwaters were at Yankee Doodle Creek, which now flows into the Berkley Pit, where the water is as acidic as tomatoes.

And Butte is the epicenter of the Milltown Reservoir Sediments Superfund Site, which is named for the dam that was removed near Missoula, but covers 120 miles of the Clark Fork, from Butte to Bonner.

It's the largest and most expensive Superfund site in America and now one of the nation's 21st century's great environmental success stories. The riverbed was meticulously cleaned, and at some points the flow was temporarily diverted to really get at the dirt underneath. Today the Blackfoot flows into the Clark Fork liked it used to 70 years before Norman Maclean even published "A River Runs Through It."

"Growing up in Butte shows you the pretty stark contrast between clean water and dirty or contaminated water," Lester said.

This movie is a chance to examine that contrast, combining education with entertainment.

Lester and Mitchell's 2023 expedition was closely watched, with multiple s in Butte's Montana Standard newspaper and a feature about the pair when they rolled through Missoula .

It was so well publicized that even folks on this side of the Continental Divide started noticing. Billings area patrons requested that the movie be shown at the Art House Cinema and Pub so much that the theater reached out to Lester before the movie was even officially finished.

"To know that Montana people want to see this enough to call their theater like that," Lester said, "that was pretty cool."

"Columbia River Canoe Project" premiered at the Original Mineyard in Butte in August, and since then it's been shown around the Mountain West, especially in areas within the Columbia watershed.

He's heading to Seattle next weekend and there are plans to show the movie in Portland, but the Babcock screenings are only the second showing in Montana, not including a few one-offs, like a presentation Lester did at Butte Middle School.

"I did my best to make this as good as I could," Lester said. "But the cool thing has been how excited people are after they watch it."

Lester and his crew are entering the "Columbia River Canoe Project" into film festivals, and hoping for a distribution deal that could get the movie in front of more eyes and especially onto a streaming service where rural people can check it out.

And while Lester doesn't have any plans in place (he's been a little busy lately), he'd like to work in film again.

"The adventure part has always been my passion," he said. "Adding the film part has been more rewarding that I would have ever imagined."

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