by Marshall Swearingen
...The scuffle over Sweet Grass Creek is part of a much larger struggle
in the West. In Montana alone, more than a dozen access conflicts have
flared up in recent years, as landowners gate off traditional access
routes and effectively put hundreds of square miles of public land out
of reach for people like Newmiller. Some conflicts, including the one
here at Sweet Grass Creek, have smoldered for years or even decades. In
many cases, landowners profit from the exclusive access to adjacent
public land.
In an ideal world, anyone would be able to easily access the
half-billion acres managed by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land
Management and other federal agencies in the West. But I'm struck by how
tenuous, even fragile, our connection to that land is—including the
land in this particular corner of Montana: just thin threads of roads,
where access often hangs more on the will of a landowner than on whether
a road is truly public or private. Who gets to enjoy the benefits of
public land, and at what cost, is more complicated than the crisply
mapped property lines. And opening public access is always more
difficult than closing it off.
The roots of the problem reach back to the 1800s and early 1900s,
when homesteaders carved out millions of acres from federal holdings in
the West, forming rings of private land around islands of public land.
And in what was probably the biggest giveaway of public resources in
history, the federal government spurred westward settlement—and set the
stage for innumerable future disputes—by dispensing sections (640-acre
squares) to railroad companies, creating checkerboards of private land
within those public-land islands.
For decades afterward, the public generally accessed public land on
roads scraped in to serve homesteaders, miners and loggers. In those
less-populous times, landowners were more tolerant of people crossing
their property under informal, usually undocumented, arrangements.
Today's camo-garbed hunters and pole-toting hikers still rely to a
surprising extent on those roads. And the need for more legally binding
rights to use them has grown, as a rising tide of public-land users
collides with a new generation of landowners.
...Nationwide, it's hard to calculate how much progress has been made since
1992, because the agencies don't track the amount of land that is not
adequately accessible. One Forest Service official in Washington, D.C.,
estimates that as much as 20 million acres of the agency's lands still
lack adequate access today. A 2013 report by the Center for Western
Priorities, a Denver-based think tank, identified 4 million acres of
Forest Service, BLM, state and other public lands, in six Western
states, that were completely inaccessible. Montana had the largest
share—nearly 2 million acres—of this "landlocked" public domain.
...On the other side, private landowners often have good intentions,
too. Until 2012, for instance, Paul Hansen allowed access through his
Montana ranch to federal lands roughly 140 miles southwest of the
Crazies. The ranch, which has been in his family for four generations,
stretches 25 miles along a county road in a narrow valley bracketed by
sagebrush foothills and timbered mountains. Several of its roads branch
from the county road and climb into BLM land, with Forest Service land
not far above. It's prime elk-hunting territory, and during hunting
season, Hansen allowed people to use his roads, which were never gated,
and even hunt portions of his land; the rest of the year, he paid little
attention to the issue. But the number of hunters grew each year until
they became a problem.
Montana has a "block management" program that compensates landowners
for providing public hunting access on their property. But when I meet
Hansen on one of the few mornings when he's not haying or moving cattle,
he tells me how, in 2011, hundreds of hunters came through, maxing out
the $12,000 he gets from the program. Their ATVs became a nuisance,
spreading invasive knapweed. And the increase in traffic along the
narrow gravel county road, which his kids drive every day to town, was
especially troubling. "You'd think this was the interstate out here," he
says. "It was like driving the gauntlet."
One November afternoon in 2010, when the county road was slick with
new snow, Hansen's daughter, Jody, was driving home in a bulky Chevy
Suburban SUV. A jacked-up Dodge pickup, obviously speeding—one hunter
driving and another in the passenger seat—fishtailed and collided
head-on with the Suburban, plowing onto the hood within inches of the
windshield. Pinned inside with broken ankles and a broken arm, Jody
drifted in and out of consciousness for two hours as emergency
responders cut her from the vehicle. A similar problem occurred the
following year, during hunting season: A speeding pickup, presumably
driven by a hunter, crested a hill and skidded sideways past Jody as she
veered into the ditch. The driver didn't stop. "It got to be too much,"
Hansen says. "We said: 'We're done with this.'"
Interesting, but the author makes no mention of federal agency actions to close roads and limit access. He focuses strickly on the private land owner.
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