The Final Days of Montana's Finest Singletrack
Montana is blessed with hundreds of miles of high-alpine singletrack - most of it could soon be closed to bikes. Photo: Bob Allen
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Lawyers are everywhere. Men with close-cut
hair in blue suits, gray suits and even a few
brown suits loiter in the anteroom of the District
Court in Missoula, Montana. These men
and women have gathered to decide the fate of
our trails. There are lawyers representing the
Wilderness Society, the Wilderness Association,
the Forest Service, the Blue Ribbon Coalition
of motorized users and Citizens for Balanced
Use, an off-highway vehicle group. All these
men and women—along with clusters of reporters,
clerks and concerned citizens—file into
a few wooden pews and begin a long debate
over who most loves our trails.
This orgy of lawyers was set in motion when the Gallatin National Forest released its travelmanagement plan in December 2006. The Gallatin’s 1.8 million acres include six mountain ranges, blue-ribbon trout streams and peaks that top out at more than 12,000 feet. Perhaps most importantly, the forest sits directly between Bozeman, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park. America’s land conservation movement began in earnest when Yellowstone was designated as America’s first national park in 1872, and land managers in the region have a deep respect for this heritage. They spent four years drafting Gallatin’s travel plan.
The proposed plan would curtail motorized use on trails, dropping the total miles of singletrack open to dirt bikes from 466 to 295. It also would close 144 miles of trail to mountain bikes. But the plan would keep the Gallatin Crest high country open to motorized users and mountain bikes. The plan drew swift criticism from several groups, who complained that the final version didn’t reflect public opinion, or that it didn’t go far enough to “preserve the wilderness characteristics” in the Gallatin Crest. The Montana Wilderness Association and two groups representing motorized users—Citizens for Balanced Use and the Blue Ribbon Coalition— all filed suits.
Inside the courtroom, Timothy Preso, representing the MWA, argues that dirt bikes, motorized users and mountain bikes destroy the wilderness character of the land. He talks about soil erosion and noise pollution, and claims that there is little difference between mountain bikes and motorized dirt bikes. He claims that motorized use is skyrocketing in the forest. He says that snowmobiles are going further into the mountains than ever before. He argues that mountain bikes barely existed when the Gallatin Crest was made a Wilderness Study Area in 1977, and their mere presence now violates the Forest Service’s responsibility to “preserve” the character of the land. He blames the agency for not doing its job.
Preso doesn’t mention (and strangely, neither does the lawyer representing the Forest Service) that just weeks before the hearing, the Forest Service ruled that mountain bikes should be managed as a use similar to hiking. Instead, he uses facts pulled from old studies and claims mountain bikes, just like four-wheelers and dirt bikes, lead to soil erosion and trail degradation. And because the judge knows none of this, and because the argument is clear and logical—even if the facts are fuzzy—Judge Jeremiah Lynch nods his head in agreement.
You are Tom Owen and you sit in a hardwood pew against the back wall of the Montana District Court. You wear a striped button-down shirt and gray canvas pants. You are thin-lipped with a round chin and deep-set ice-blue eyes. You’ve come to this hearing with the hopes of stating your case to the local press and anyone else who will listen. You sit on your hands while Mr. Preso claims that mountain bikes are essentially motorcycles. You know that what he really means is that mountain bikes don’t matter, and they don’t have a place in his Wilderness and that you don’t matter and neither does the bike shop you own in Big Sky that depends upon revenue from guiding rides in the Gallatin National Forest. You drank a Starbucks Shot in the parking lot and now your blood pressure is rising. You want to scream but you can’t. So you do the only thing you can in a situation like this, where you have no power and people are deciding your fate for you: You stand up, walk out of the courtroom, and take a leak.
Three days after the hearing, Tom Owen is back at his store in Big Sky. It’s a bright, warm Monday morning and the shop is mostly quiet except for the half dozen mountain bikers preparing to ride the Buffalo Horn to Porcupine trail. They load bikes into the back of Owen’s cargo van, and the pyramid of Big Sky’s Lone Peak fills the horizon to the rear as they head to the first drop point.
Buffalo Horn begins with a long, rolling climb from a swampy drainage behind a horse ranch. For the first few hundred yards, the trail is barely discernible. Heavy horse traffic has widened it to a dozen feet in places. Elsewhere, trotting hooves have left swampy depressions and pools of mud mixed with grassy manure.
While mountain bikers might soon be banned from these trails, equestrians would still be allowed to ride here. The irony of this is too much for Owen. “The horses are killing these trails,” he says. “They can do more damage in a weekend than a whole summer of mountain biking.”
This trail lies in the Hyalite Porcupine Buffalo Horn Wilderness Study Area of the Gallatin— the area in which lawyers and judges are debating whether mountain bikers belong. For Owen, the answer is easy. If the WSA is closed to bikes, there won’t be any trails left to guide rides on.
“I’d hate for the only offering I have for visitors to Big Sky be a 6-mile paved bike path,” he says. “There are only so many Tshirts you can sell. If I relied only on locals, I would go out of business. I need tourists to survive. These trails bring them in.”
There are no horses on the trail today. No dirt bike riders, no hikers and no lawyers. Owen is hundreds of miles from the courtroom in Missoula, and the only people out are a handful of riders enjoying a perfect summer afternoon. Seven miles in, the trail approaches Ramshorn Lake, its glassy waters reflecting the surrounding peaks. Owen basks in the sun and stares at the craggy slopes to the east, debating with his wife, Stasia, whether the white specks they see among the cliffs are sheep, or piles of old snow.
Owen freely admits he wants to keep this trail open so his business will survive. But his motives are not entirely financial. Near the end of the ride he pauses to catch his breath and watch the sun set behind Lone Peak. His shop is just below, in a valley that is glowing gold from the last few rays of sun trapped between the hills.
“I like to bring Stasia up here after work,” he says. “We can close the shop, cut across here, watch the sunset and head back down before dark. It’s our date loop.”
You are John Gatchell, a 56-year-old conservation director for the Montana Wilderness Association. For 24 years, you’ve worked to create Wilderness in Montana. You’re a highranking offi cial at a powerful advocacy group with 5,700 members and a million-dollar budget, and you haven’t seen one acre of new Wilderness created during your tenure.
But you love your job, love your mission, and you especially love your trails. So you show up at a trail-building day outside of Helena, Montana, to break ground on a new trail and celebrate the High Divide Trail agreement between hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians. You wear a shirt emblazoned with the words “Keep it Wild,” put on a big smile, roll your sleeves up and get to work digging out stumps and cutting trails alongside mountain bikers.
Gatchell ducks out of the snow and enters a large canvas tent filled with smoke from wood-fired camp stoves. Inside, a few dozen men and women eager to build a new trail have gathered. It is a diverse group of backcountry horsemen, hikers, conservationists and mountain bikers that include members of IMBA’s Trail Care Crew, the Montana Mountain Bike Alliance and local riders from Helena and Butte.
“The work you are doing today is going to create great opportunities for everyone,” Gatchell says to the crowd.
The crisp air keeps the words to a minimum, and soon 50 people have grabbed Pulaskis, McLeods, axes and shovels and spread out through the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest pulling roots, discarding deadwood and raking a trail into the hard earth. When completed, this trail will become an 8-mile section of the Continental Divide Trail, replacing a stretch of the CDT that runs through the Electric Peak Roadless Area.
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