Bloomberg Businessweek USA - October 30, 2017

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Bloomberg Businessweek October 30, 2017

If he stumbles on a startled bear at close

range, the retired sheriff ’s deputy wants

to know the gun is within quick reach,

in case something stronger than pepper

spray is needed. Wilson isn’t the type

who likes to take chances; he’s the type

who plans ahead.

Before setting foot on this path, he

unfolded a huge U.S. Forest Service map

and reviewed the route, Trail 267. He

put a finger at the trailhead, which was

next to a ranger’s station, then traced

its meandering path into the Crazy

Mountains, a chain in South Central

Montana that’s part of the Northern

Rockies. Like many of the trails and

roads that lead into U.S. Forest Service

land, Trail 267 twists in and out of

private properties. These sorts of paths

have been used as access points for

decades, but “No Trespassing” signs

are popping up on them with increas-

ing frequency, along with visitors’ logs

in which hikers, hunters, and Forest

Service workers are instructed to sign

their names, tacitly acknowledging that

the trail is private and that permission

for its use was granted at the private

landowners’ discretion.

Wilson hates the signs and the log-

books, interpreting them as under-

handed attempts by a handful of

ranchers to dictate who gets to enter

federal property adjacent to their own.

Several of the owners operate commer-

cial hunting businesses or rental cabins;

by controlling the points of ingress to

public wilderness, Wilson says, they

could effectively turn tens of thousands

of acres of federal land into extensions

of their own ranches. That would allow

them to charge thousands of dollars per

day for exclusive access, while turning

away anyone—hikers, anglers, bikers,

hunters, locals like Wilson, or even forest

rangers—who didn’t strike a deal.

Wilson, 63, is out on the trail to show

me how the paths weave through private

plots before reaching a destination he

loves, and to show me why he loves it:

The pebbled trout streams are crystal-

line, the elk run rampant, and paint-

erly snowcaps break the big sky. The

ranches along the way are pretty great,

too, the kind of real estate that inspires—

and, if acquired, perhaps even satis-

fies—the hunger a lot of people feel for

scenic refuge. Many of the landholders

are newcomers from out of state, though

some old-timers remain— families that

earned their deeds generations ago, the

principal paid by ancestors who shiv-

ered through pitiless winters in tar-

paper shacks. Wilson has been hiking

and hunting the Crazies since he was a

little kid, but only in the past year or

so, he says, have the private ranchers

seemed more like obstacles than neigh-

bors. “They could shut down pretty

much the whole interior of the Crazy

Mountains, as far as I can see,” he says.

He trudges up a rooty slope and, after

a blind bend, sees something straddling

the trail that stops him cold. It’s a pad-

locked metal gate. He hiked this trail a

couple of weeks before, and the fence

wasn’t there. A sign on it reads, “Private

Property: No Forest Service Access,

No Trespassing.” It’s exactly the kind

of sign he’d been bad-mouthing a few

minutes earlier, but he wasn’t expect-

ing to see one here. The locked gate feels

like an escalation, a new weapon in an

improvised war.

The change in Wilson’s hiking plan is

frustrating, but he’s getting used to the

feeling. A year ago he was just a retired

county lawman working as a trustee for

the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, and

he never would have guessed that, in

a battle involving ranchers, he’d find

himself on the side of dirt bikers and

trail rats.

A debate is taking place across

the country over preserving land for

recreational public use, but most of the

attention is focused on vast swaths of

historically or scientifically significant

Area shown

GRAPHIC BY BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. DATA: MONTANA STATE LIBRARY, BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT, U.S. FOREST SERVICE

Bears Ears

Katahdin

Woods and Waters

Custer Gallatin National Forest boundary

The forest’s patchwork

of private and public

lands stems from

century-old land grants

for railroad development

that passed into the

hands of private owners.

National

Forest trail

Public land

Trail 115/136:

Hailstone Ranch argued

that its trail shouldn’t be

used by the public and

had hunter Rob Gregoire

cited for criminal

trespass.

CRAZY

MOUNTAINS

Trail 267:

A main access point

to public land from

the Crazies’ west side

got a new gate on

a section owned by

Ned Zimmerman.

Interior Secretary Ryan

Zinke recommended

seven terrestrial and

three marine national

monuments be either

shrunk or opened to

commercial use.

Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks

Gold Butte Rio Grande del Norte

Grand

Staircase-

Escalante

Cascade-

Siskiyou

Brad Wilson is following a forest trail

and scanning the dusky spaces between

the fir trees for signs of movement.

The black handle of a .44 Magnum juts

prominently from his pack.