“If someone had told me 20 years ago I’d be catching trout here, I’d have taken that bet,” said Matt Vincent, a former local government executive and now a consultant who has been working on the cleanup for two decades, as he stood on the bank.

The recently announced plan calls for the portion of Silver Bow that flows through Slag Canyon — whose walls are made of mine waste — to be rerouted into a new channel away from the waste’s toxic soils. The plan also calls for cleaning up hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of buried mine waste along the creek’s route.

It’s a relief for many who feared that the confidential negotiations among the state, the E.P.A. and officials from Atlantic Richfield would leave vast amounts of mine tailings waste, or ore waste, in the ground where it was dumped by mining companies. Many here simply do not trust the science that found that “waste in place” is a safe alternative. In fact, some buried tailings have been leaching contaminated water the color of blue Gatorade into the reclaimed creek. They are to be dug up and taken away in the coming months, to property owned by a mining company here.

But there is still concern that there’s no plan to reclaim the last mile of the little creek. In a state famous for pristine trout streams and the film “A River Runs Through It,” those who support a flowing, babbling last mile see it as a way to transform Butte from being one of the country’s largest Superfund sites, to something more befitting.

Upper Silver Bow , in east central Butte, has a long way to go. It’s a shadow of its former self, dry and rerouted and looking like little more than a undistinguished ditch. Until two years ago, it was officially called the Metro Storm Drain, until Mr. Daily and others won a four-year court battle against the state to have it renamed Silver Bow Creek, so the state would be required to restore it.