BHA Montana and the Fight for Public Access in the Crazy Mountains

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Zack Williams

Outdoors, Wilderness, Sports, Fishing, Outdoor, Hunting, Sports & Recreation

4.6 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2020

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the West, it’s called “the checkerboard” – one square mile of public land (640 acres, called a section) then one square mile of private – a direct result of frontier-era policies where the federal government gave away millions of acres of land, some to homesteaders but many to politically connected industries such as the railroads and timber companies. The idea, beyond just enriching a privileged few and scoring political power, was to encourage development of the West – timber for railroad ties and mining supports and lumber mills. The result, in our modern U.S., is a tangle of ownership and, sometimes, an access and land management nightmare. The Crazy Mountains of Montana are one such landscape, a garbled mix of public and private sections, and one where private landowners seem to be playing another old game from the frontier era: blocking access to public lands by controlling sections of private land

Transcript

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0:00.0	God they look like Logan's Pass in Glacier National Park, you know, all the
0:08.6	peaks are glacially carved and these high mountain lakes and big rock faces and deep drainages and crystal clear
0:15.3	water lush hanging gardens I mean the crazies are just so cool.
0:20.1	But in that case what you're doing is to establish precedent for every Forest Service
0:24.7	supervisor for decades or centuries to come to say that there is precedent here in the
0:30.1	crazy mountains that we have the obligation to maintain these access trails and
0:36.6	we'll do whatever it takes.
0:38.6	And eventually, I'm telling you, we're going to come to a place in the United States. We may lose it all, but I doubt it.
0:45.0	We're going to come to the United States in our country where we win,
0:48.0	and these public lands and these things are going to be settled.
0:51.0	Because we're going to see these things as the
0:53.4	greatest asset just like we know what they are what they are and we're going to
0:57.6	prioritize those as a national treasure and y'all's precedent is going to be on the books and it'll be part of this
1:05.5	solution to this nuttiness. That that playbook is being used right now by people
1:12.4	throwing up illegal gates and kind of
1:13.8	testing the system they're challenging the Forest Service they're
1:16.3	challenging the public they're challenging the different agencies to to do something
1:20.3	about it there's something to be said for this intrinsic value of just wildness you know and like
1:25.1	that's what these public lands provide and freedom freedom capital F now yeah
1:30.0	capital S. We'd like to thank Sitka Gear,
1:35.0	maker of the most effective hunting and outdoor apparel in the world
1:39.0	for their sponsorship of this podcast.
	...

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