Not that this is any surprise, but the central Montana land swap proposal to exchange prime elk habitat in the Durfee Hills near Lewistown, for land that allows access to parts of the Missouri River Breaks National Monument, is back on the table.
The swap, proposed by Dan and Ferris Wilks, Texas brothers who have used the fortune they amassed in oil business to become Montana’s largest landowners, makes public land north of the monument that would allow motorized public access via the Bullwhacker Road to 50,000 acres. In exchange, the Wilks get the 2,700-acre Durfee Hills parcel that is landlocked within the brothers’ expansive N Bar Ranch.
I remain torn on this one. Access into the Breaks is important, and the Bullwhacker may have been lost because of a failure to appeal a district court decision that barred the public from using the road. (This case — like others including the Mitchell Slough and Ruby River stream access decisions — is a reminder that Montana district court judges have a spotty record in access cases. Access advocates need to include contingencies for appealing to the state’s highest court if they take the legal route).
On the flip side, access to the Durfee Hills is limited to those who can afford a helicopter or airplane ride in. On the face of it, the swap seems a no-brainer: Get complete access to one piece of public land while giving up access to another piece that may always be isolated and costly to visit.
Public land access and management issues are never that simple, however. The Hills is one of the few places hunters can access the herd of elk that live on the N Bar, a herd that may be one of the largest in Montana.
The Wilks brothers own the N Bar, but they don’t own the elk, so some form of access to that herd needs to be part of any land exchange. Wildlife management, especially in the case of a tasty big game species, ultimately means killing animals through hunting. If the herd is landlocked on the N Bar that can’t happen.
The Wilks brothers seem to be acknowledging that fact. Their latest counter proposal includes the added incentive of placing a big chunk of their ranch lands in Montana’s Block Management Program. That’s a step in the right direction, but participation in Block Management is voluntary. There’s nothing to prevent the Wilks brothers, or future landowners, from removing the property from the program at a later date.
Negotiating a some kind of permanent public hunting access right will be complicated, but it’s doable if the parties are motivated to make this exchange work. Figure public access out and it will go a long way toward making an exchange deal palatable.
As access increasingly becomes one of the most contentious issues for Montanans, the dispute about this particular swap highlights the kind of nasty divisions that we are likely to see in the future. For one, the Wilks brothers didn’t do anything to ingratiate themselves with their new Montana neighbors when they responded to the BLM’s rejection of their first proposal by constructing a fence around the Durfee Hills parcel, a fence that may have encroached on public land.
The other troubling development is the role a group known as the “Friends of the Missouri Breaks Monument” is playing in the exchange discussion. One of the solutions to the Bullwhacker Road problem is the construction of a new road to bypass private property. The “Friends” don’t want to see another road built and instead support a land exchange. The group should state definitively that it will not support a land swap that harms users of a swapped parcel elsewhere in the state.
Conservationists in Montana need to work together on access issues. If we start leveraging the politics of the moment against one another we’ll all lose in the end.