I spend a lot of time in the woods around Northwest Montana. Sometimes I’m on a bike. Sometimes I’m hunting or hiking. Increasingly, I’m there for work. As executive director of Flathead Area Mountain Bikers, part of my job is walking through the forest with land managers, foresters and trail crews, talking about what a piece of ground might look like five, 10, or 50 years from now.
The ongoing debate over historic trails in Haskill Basin has put timber management and recreation at odds again. F. H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co., the family-owned timber company that owns about 3,020 acres in the basin, has legitimate concerns about the intersection of unmanaged trails and its priorities as owners of working forest. The company recently revised its Open Lands Policy to clarify that bicycles are prohibited off existing roads, including on user-built trails that have existed for decades. The basin also supplies roughly 90% of Whitefish’s drinking water.
The outdoor recreation community, meanwhile, wants to preserve access to the trails it has used for years. Some trail users thought they were doing just that when voters approved a resort tax increase in 2015 that helped the city of Whitefish and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks buy a conservation easement on Stoltze’s land in the basin.
Timber and recreation are both part of Northwest Montana’s identity. For generations, timber has supported local jobs, families and businesses. Recreation has become an important economic driver as well, bringing people together and connecting them to the forests surrounding our communities. People build their lives around access to the outdoors here.
We need to stop treating timber and recreation like enemies competing for the same landscape. That doesn’t reflect how most of us live or how these forests could be managed.
Late this summer, I spent a day south of Bigfork walking a future trail corridor in the Crane Mountain area with Swan Lake Ranger District staff. Over the course of about a mile, the route passes through three very different sections of forest, including two different timber treatments that will leave varying amounts of trees standing. Nearby, another section is being managed specifically for fuels reduction.
We weren’t walking through a forest being set aside for recreation. We were figuring out how recreation can fit into a working forest being managed for a lot of different reasons.
At Crane, forest management isn’t something happening separately from our trail planning. It’s part of it. Where treatments are happening, what the forest will look like afterward and what management may need to happen decades from now all influence where a trail should go today.
Trees and trails operate on very different timelines. Timber management happens periodically over decades. In all those years between treatments, a trail can provide value to a community day after day. People can hike it, bike it, hunt from it, and use it to get into the woods without preventing forest managers from continuing to harvest timber or manage fuels.
Those of us advocating for recreation have to be okay with that. A trail may need to close while logging or fuels-reduction work takes place. Equipment may need to cross it. We may have to come back afterward and repair sections, and occasionally a trail may need to move or be completely rebuilt.
We can’t ask for access to working forests and then expect those forests to stop being working forests.
But I’d ask something of the other side as well.
When an established recreation resource overlaps with a management area, bring recreation into the conversation early. That doesn’t mean every foot of trail needs to be preserved, but those community assets deserve consideration when decisions are being made.
Sometimes the solution might be an adjustment to a cut unit. Other times, it might mean changing a trail alignment, closing a trail for a season or crafting a plan to rebuild it afterward. I’ve asked loggers to leave trees near a trail corridor for shade, and they have. I’ve also had to adjust how many trees we hoped to leave standing because a forest management unit needed more for a timber sale to pencil out. That’s the path forward when both sides are trying to make it work.
As our communities grow, the demands on the forests surrounding them will only increase. I don’t think the answer is to draw harder lines between working forests and places where people recreate. We need to get better at managing these landscapes for the many opportunities they provide.
I hope the conversation around Haskill Basin leads to a recognition that both timber management and recreation belong here, and that finding room for both is worth the effort. Foresters, land managers and recreation advocates all bring valuable knowledge to the table, and the best outcomes come when that expertise is shared. Let’s make that kind of collaboration the status quo.
Ron Brandt is executive director of Flathead Area Mountain Bikers (FAMB).