access points, the one argued by
Justice Department attorneys in the
Wonder Ranch LLC case. Obama himself
outlined his administration’s overarch-
ing philosophy when he visited south-
ern Montana during his first term to try
his hand at fly- fishing. “He said he felt
really strongly that a key to getting kids
to become adults that care about their
natural surroundings is making sure they
can get out to them in the first place,”
says Dan Vermillion, a local fly-fishing
outfitter and the chair of Montana’s Fish
and Wildlife Commission, who waded
into the Gallatin River with Obama.
“Public access is one of those great
equalizers that says whether you’re rich,
poor, or otherwise, you still have access
to public lands, and you can go out and
enjoy them.”
For a while, it seemed that attitude
might be one of the rare Obama posi-
tions that President Donald Trump
could live with. In a pre-election inter-
view, Trump told the magazine Field &
Stream he didn’t like the idea of trans-
ferring the land to the states, suggesting
such transfers could erode public over-
sight of them: “I want to keep the lands
great, and you don’t know what the state
is going to do,” he said. “I mean, are they
going to sell if they get into a little bit
of trouble? And I don’t think it’s some-
thing that should be sold. We have to
be great stewards of this land. This is
magnificent land.”
Public land advocates smelled a con-
tradiction, since the new president was
positioning himself elsewhere as a cham-
pion of private property rights. And
regardless of what he said, Trump’s cam-
paign had tapped into a very deep well of
antigovernment sentiment, the sort that
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy appealed
to when he occupied public territories
and led armed standoffs against federal
agents in 2014 and again in 2016. The
co-chair of a state group called Veterans
for Trump pleaded guilty to helping
organize the ad hoc rebel militia, and
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser,
has been one of Bundy’s most vocal
supporters. Immediately after the elec-
tion, whether or not the results had any-
thing to do with their actions, the Crazy
Mountains landowners launched a col-
lective blitz to take control of the trails
leading to Forest Service property.
ROB GREGOIRE, AN ENGINEER FROM
Bozeman, Mont., says he had little idea
what awaited him when he marched up
the Crazy Mountains on Nov. 23, 2016.
He’d been granted a state tag allowing
him to hunt bull elk on the eastern
slopes, and before he set out for Forest
Service land, he’d called Sienkiewicz,
the district ranger, to double-check
that the public trail marked on his map
was indeed public. The ranger had
explained agency policy to him, which
indicated that the trail was public, but
told Gregoire to use his own judgment
if a landowner objected.
Gregoire decided to go for it. When
the trail veered through a private plot
called the Hailstone Ranch, he spotted
a No Trespassing sign that read, “The
Forest Service Has No Easement Here.”
He ignored it, consulting his GPS to make
sure he never strayed from the path onto
the private ranch land. The landowner
somehow detected that he was using the
trail (“I think he had an alarm or some-
thing,” Gregoire later speculated) and
called a sheriff ’s deputy, who was waiting
for Gregoire to return at the end of the
day. The deputy charged him with crim-
inal trespassing.
Shortly after that, the owners of nine
ranches neighboring the Hailstone went
after Sienkiewicz. Back on July 20, a
volunteer at Public Land/Water Access
Association Inc., a Montana nonprofit
that supports open public access to
federal lands and waterways, had gotten
ahold of, then posted on its Facebook
page, Sienkiewicz’s most recent annual
email reminder to his staff advising them
never to sign visitor logs for trail access
or ask permission. The property owners
apparently assumed that Sienkiewicz
had posted the item himself—proof that
he was behaving as a political activist,
not a public servant. The ranch owners
sent a letter to U.S. Senator Steve Daines,
a Republican representing Montana,
saying in part, “As a direct result of this
inflammatory Facebook post, we have
many questions about the FS position
regarding access across our private
property.” Several of the ranchers who
signed the letter have also been listed as
contributors to Daines’s political cam-
paigns in the past five years.
In May, Daines echoed the land-
owners’ complaints—and forwarded a
screen shot of the Facebook post—in a
letter to Thomas Tidwell, then the chief
of the Forest Service, and to Agriculture
Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose agency
oversees the Forest Service. Less than
two weeks later, Representative Pete
Sessions (R-Texas) got involved, firing
off a similar complaint to Perdue and
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has
a long history in Montana. An avid hunter
and fisherman, he was born in Bozeman,
62
Bloomberg Businessweek October 30, 2017
PERC’s
Anderson says
ranch owners
serve nature
better than
government can
