From High Country News: "The billionaires’ club at the center of America’s public lands fight." The basic issue:
At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.
[snip]
The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club — an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.
[snip]
PERCHED MORE THAN 7,000 FEET above sea level, the Yellowstone Club was built atop former public lands acquired through land exchanges with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s. It has since converted more than 15,000 acres outside Big Sky into one of the most exclusive communities on the planet.
The club’s membership has included familiar names: celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton; tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt; and financial elites like Bill Ackman, Warren Buffett and Robert Herjavec.
Inside its gates, the Yellowstone Club has an 18-hole golf course, a concert venue, a movie theater, a dedicated fire department, hundreds of luxury homes and nearly 3,000 acres of private ski slopes. Initiation runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and an undeveloped lot inside the gate has sold for as much as $10 million, according to Forbes.
CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, bought the Yellowstone Club out of bankruptcy in 2009.
In the 17 years since, the firm has expanded its Montana portfolio — developed through a subsidiary called Lone Mountain Land Company — to become one of the largest luxury-resort footprints in the Rocky Mountains.
The article mentions that some of the top government officials responsible for overseeing public lands themselves belong to the Club or have other conflicts of interest. The article continues:
“The landowners now have access to the public lands in a really exclusive way,” said Cleveland of Wild Montana. She said the exchange gives these landowners “easy access into that country where the public has to hike 20 miles of backcountry trail to get in there” and “opens the door to a much more realistic development scenario.”
The most contested piece of the deal was the trail network. Two historic public trails had appeared on Forest Service maps for more than a century. The exchange abandoned the public’s claim to both.
In their place, the Yellowstone Club agreed to pay for a new 22-mile trail on mostly public land, at a substantially higher elevation, as part of a 40-mile backcountry loop.
“Can you imagine elderly folks and younger folks trying to hike that,” asked Wilson on a visit to the future trailhead. “It’s not hiker friendly at all. Definitely not hunter friendly.”
He looked up at the nearly vertical wall of shale rock where the trail is slated to start.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said.
Public lands used to be for the public. Even the National Parks and National Monuments, whatever other limitations were imposed on commercial development, largely remained open for public recreation. But then came the Wilderness Lands. These are the modern day equivalent of the "King's Forest" from feudal times. In theory they are open to the public for recreation, but the prohibitions on roads make them largely inaccessible except to the rich who can afford both the time and money to ride in on horses or fly into a handful of airstrips.
But it seems that it has become harder to designate additional wilderness. So what seems to be happening is for a federal agency--for instance, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or the Forest Service--to restrict access.
In my neck of the woods, I've seen the BLM sell off the land that has the roads to access certain area, leaving an "island" of BLM land surrounded by private land. Great for ranchers and for environmentalists, but not for the public seeking to access the land for recreation. The Forest Service, on the other hand, is simply not maintaining roads and trails and then closing them as being too dangerous. For instance, there is a wonderful hiking and camping area near my area, up past a reservoir, that used to have three main road leading into the area. The most accessible road suffered a landslide some time back and they simply never reopened it. The difficulty of reaching it from the other directions has severely restricted its accessibility.
Sometimes the private landowners will also sabotage access. The article mentions private land owners illegally blocking public roads or trails that crossed their land. I too have seen that, with ranchers putting up fences across public roads and trails on land they are leasing from the BLM. They are supposed to leave a means to go through--a gate or area of fence that can be moved--but more and more do not. One area I've enjoyed for hiking has a section of hiking trail that parallels a fence dividing the National Forest from some private land. This past summer, I found a tree that had been cut on the private side of the fence in such a way that it fell on the public side of the fence and lengthwise along the hiking trail blocking a considerable length. Other sections also had trees that had been felled to block or obstruct the trail.
Related:
- "Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Sues Montana FWP Over Corner Crossing"--Outdoor Life. That is, crossing into a federal land that is corner locked--where the only way to access the land is crossing at the corner from one piece of public land to the other.
- "Senator Seeks to Transfer 140,000 Acres of Louisiana’s Only National Forest. Residents Are Furious"--Outdoor Life. Per the article:
A draft bill attributed to a Louisiana senator’s office seeks to convey roughly 140,000 acres of the Kisatchie National Forest to the local government of Grant Parish in central Louisiana. That represents nearly a quarter, or about 23 percent, of the state’s only National Forest land.
The excuse for the transfer is to help speed economic development, which sounds suspiciously like making it possible to eventually transfer the land to a developer.
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