“A group of school kids in Great Falls basically went out and got a drainage ditch surveyed for a school project,” Gomberg said. “And they got the U.S. Survey of Geographical Names to go along with it. The city fathers and mothers here thought that just wasn’t right.” Gomberg obtained an official length study, conducted in 1988 by civil engineer Gene T. Ginther, which found that the D River was actually 120 feet long, give or take 5 feet. While this study may not have been completely impartial, having been paid for by the Devils Lake Water Improvement District and conducted by an engineer whose office was located on West Devils Lake Road, it was valid enough for the Guinness Book to re-open the case. In the summer of 1990, Gomberg held a press conference on the banks of the mighty D. He donned his boots, walked out into the river near the Hwy. 101 bridge, and told the assembled members of the press (including three television crews from Portland), that he was standing in the World’s Shortest River once again. The Guinness Book officials had decided to let the Roe and the D share the title. Fortunately, all the signs could remain. How did they shrink the D River, from the original 440 feet to 120 feet with a 5 foot variable? It’s all about the criteria, and whose to use. The original length was measured from an unknown spot on the east side of the Hwy. 101 bridge to the low tide line, which is no doubt west of the sea wall, on the beach. The engineer Ginther decided to begin around the same place, the old fish control structure about 20 feet east of the bridge, but stop much further east, above the line of “extreme high tide.” This point, where the tide ceases to be a “regularly influencing element,” is parallel to the current location of the informational kiosk in the D River State Recreational Site parking lot. The exact points of reference may be hard to find, but one thing is clear: most of the World’s Shortest River is obscured by the highway that has helped to make it famous. At the press conference in 1990, Gomberg recalled, the reporters were a little dubious. He remembers one of them pointed downstream, west of the wading chamber director, and asked, “If you’re standing at the end of the river, then what is all that wet stuff on the beach?” “I said, ‘That’s the D River Estuary,’ which is true, really, because you can’t really call it a bay. Maybe it’s the D River tidal plain,” he said.