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terrain that Presidents Barack Obama,
Bill Clinton, and to a lesser extent
George W. Bush protected under
the national monument designation,
for example Bears Ears in Utah and
Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine.
These disputed trails leading into the
Crazy Mountains represent another
front in the escalating battle over control
of federal territory, and the fighting here
is just as contentious as over the mon-
uments. Historic settlement patterns in
the American West created a checker-
board pattern of landownership: Public
properties are often broken-up plots,
resulting in numerous access disputes.
According to a 2013 study by the Center
for Western Priorities, that dynamic has
effectively locked the public out of about
4 million acres of land in western states;
almost half of that blocked public land,
or about 2 million acres, is in Montana,
according to the study. The push to
end public thoroughfare is either an
overdue reassertion of private property
rights or an openly cynical land snatch,
depending which side of the gate you’re
standing on.
Before Wilson turns around and walks
back to the trailhead, he vows that he’ll
be better prepared next time. Alongside
the .44 he’ll pack a pair of super-heavy-
duty bolt cutters, and he swears he’ll tear
that gate down.LATE LAST OCTOBER, IN THE DYING
days of the Obama era, a U.S. District
judge issued a verdict that seemed to
set a precedent for paths like this one.
The Texas-based owners of a Montana
property called Wonder Ranch, about
100 miles southeast of the Crazy
Mountains, had sued the Forest Service
after the government filed a statement
of interest claiming an easement—a legal
agreement to use a portion of some-
one’s land for a specific purpose—on a
trail that ran across the ranch’s prop-
erty before reaching the Lee Metcalf
Wilderness. The Forest Service said
the trail had been routinely used as an
access route to the forest by the gov-
ernment and the public for decades,
and therefore it should be considered
public because of historical use. The
owners’ suit argued that the govern-
ment had no right to an easement. The
Department of Justice countersued,
producing evidence dating more than
a century showing that the public andthe government consistently used the
trail for packhorses and hike-ins. The
Forest Service won the case.
Had the landowners been able to
show that the trail had been used for
at least five consecutive years only by
those who’d received their permission,
their claims of private control might
have held. That helps explain why Alex
Sienkiewicz, the forest ranger oversee-
ing the district that includes the Crazy
Mountains, every year sends an email
to his staff reminding them never to ask
landowners’ permission to use trails
that the government already considers
public. “By asking permission,” he wrote
in last year’s reminder, “one under-
mines the public access rights and plays
into their lawyers’ trap of establishing
a history of permissive access.” That
didn’t mean anyone could veer off the
trail and slip onto the private property—
that’s trespassing, no question about it—
it just meant the trail itself should be
considered a public throughway.
Every trail leading to public land is
different, and not all necessarily have a
history of public use, but Sienkiewicz
was echoing the government’s generally
established position regarding suchA disputed road
leading to public
land, blocked by the
landowning Galt
family, who sell
self-guided hunts
on their ranch