I moved to Hamilton from my hometown of Riverside, California, in 1992. My first look at the Bitterroot or Montana was on my drive to town. It wasn’t quite what I expected.
I noted how the ranchette sprawl near Darby reminded me of booming Southern California, albeit on a much smaller scale. I like to imagine I knew even then that the extraction paradigm of the West I’d learned from books and newspapers had already been replaced.
The truth is I didn’t figure it out until a few years later when the access fight at Mitchell Slough began in earnest.
I suppose in 1992 maybe the extraction paradigm hadn’t been replaced, but that change was imminent. One of the first stories I reported for the daily newspaper in Hamilton was about agricultural runoff in the Bitterroot River. That seemed like the sort of story I expected to write about in Montana. Resource extraction fouling the natural environment that had lured me to the Treasure State.
Those days there were still a few folks focused on getting the last of the “big pickles” — a phrase a logging adjacent Forest Service employee once used with me to describe the still-standing old-growth ponderosa pine on the Bitterroot — to the mills. I was once almost run out of town when I spoke too loudly in a Darby bar about how we needed to stop cutting old-growth timber on the Bitterroot National Forest —I didn’t yet know that “big pickles” was a far cooler name for old-growth timber.
In my defense, I was much younger then, and I’d just moved from Southern California, so it was hard for me to grasp the profound economic impact a busy mill had on a community the size of Darby.
Also, in my defense, the Forest Service had for decades been too eager to provide big pickles for the timber industry, not just in the Bitterroot, but across the West for too long.
That was another era, one that was either dead or on life support when I rolled into town, my head brimming with ideas I picked up in the city and by reading a lot of Edward Abbey.
In 1992 Mitchell Slough was the future. It’s been our present ever since.
Access is now one of the most valuable scarce resources in the West and the wealthy have taken notice. Mitchell Slough. The Ruby River. The Crazies. Wyoming’s corner-crossing tyranny. It’s where the action is these days.
As citizens go to the polls in the next few weeks it’s important hunters and anglers keep this in mind as they cast their ballots, in Montana and across the West. I’m not going to make candidate recommendations, but you can rather easily sort out who is on the right side of this issue.
The recommendation I will make is that if you are a hunter or angler, access is the most important issue affecting these sports. That goes for other outdoor users as well, but hunters and anglers are the point of the spear when it comes to access.
There are relatively few outdoor initiatives on the ballot in the West this year. The most significant, Colorado’s Proposition 127, would ban hunting and trapping of mountain lions, bobcats and lynx (lynx are already protected).
I’m not a trapper and I’ve no inclination to hunt lions or bobcats, but I’d be a solid “No” vote if I lived in Colorado. I remain an old-fashioned kind of guy who continues to have faith in state wildlife agencies to make the best call when it comes to wildlife management. And if you’re a regular reader of this column you know I consider hunting, killing frankly, an essential tool for wildlife management. Predator-prey populations can and will grow out of balance.
Many Coloradoans probably don’t realize it, but Prop 127 may end up harming more wildlife than it protects.