In the last 18 months, long-simmering disputes have boiled over amid claims of trespassing, political meddling, government bullying, and retaliation. Some worry that what’s happening there may harbinger what’s to come on public land across the nation.
In the fall of 2016, Rob Gregoire, a hunter and nearly life-long Montanan, won a state lottery for a permit to take a trophy elk in the Crazy Mountains, which rise from the plains about 60 miles north of Yellowstone National Park. Landowners around the mountains were charging about $2,000 for private hunts on their ranches. “That’s just not what I do, on principle,” Gregoire says. So he found a public access corridor that would take him into prime Crazies elk country—the federal land covered by the permit, which in total cost about $40. Such trails have led into the Crazies for generations. And disputes between landowners and those who would cross their properties on these trails reach back nearly that far, too. By 2016, the trailhead Gregoire found was “the last non-contested public access point on the 35-mile-long eastern flank of the Crazy Mountains,” he would write later to his U.S. senators. Yet even on what Gregoire thought was a public throughway, the Hailstone Ranch had posted game cameras and signs claiming that the Forest Service didn’t have an easement to use the segment that crossed the private property. After consulting with the Forest Service, Gregoire was convinced he had the right to hike the route. Once on it, he used an app to stay on trail where it seemed faint, to make sure he kept to public land. Then one evening as he returned toward the trailhead after an unsuccessful hunt, Gregoire found a deputy sheriff from Sweet Grass County waiting for him. The deputy handed Gregoire a ticket for criminal trespass. After court costs, the ticket cost $585. The Crazy Mountains—brief, tall, rugged—resemble a crown that a careless ruler has dropped among the sage. Lakes of golden trout sit in the lap of their rugged cirques. Elk bugle in uncrowded forests. In the Last Best Place, they are one of the last best places. The problem is, you increasingly can't get there. In the last 18 months, long-simmering disputes over access to these publicly-owned mountains have boiled over amid claims of trespassing, political meddling, government bullying, and retaliation. Some worry that what’s happening there may harbinger what’s to come on public lands across the nation. On one side of the dispute are people such as Gregoire who want to access the public mountains, which means traversing private land. That access, they contend, is enshrined by decades of historic use. On the other side are several ranch owners who disagree, and instead call it a trampling of their property rights...more
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