BLM urged to keep Hi-Line land in natural state

A group of sportsmen, backpackers and conservationists are urging the federal Bureau of Land Management to take another look at its plan for the future of public lands along the Hi-Line.

Speaking with reporters Wednesday morning, members of the coalition said they wanted to preserve some of the best hunting land and open space in the West from encroachment of energy exploration, power lines or roads.

“This is one of the last places in the country that looks like it did when Lewis and Clark were here 200 years ago,” said Dave Chadwick, executive director of the Montana Wilderness Federation.

BLM plans to submit its plan on June 1 that will start the 30-day clock ticking for public comments. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will have 60 days to comment on the proposal, and local BLM officials said the agency hopes to have the plan, which has been in the works for several years, finalized by the end of summer.

The final plan will set the tone for land policy for the next 30 years.

For their part, BLM officials said their plan would have little or no impact on hunting or hiking in the area.

Hunting advocates said it is getting harder to get permission to hunt on private land.

“When I was younger, you could knock on just about any door and get permission to hunt,” said Dan Vermillion, a member of the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Today, he said, in many parts of the state it is getting harder to find places to hunt.

That’s why it is critical that if the Montana tradition of hunting is to continue, public lands must be available for the sports, he said.

Billings resident Joe Westman, an avid hunter on the Hi-Line, said his son is attending Montana State University-Northern this fall, and he is looking forward to hunting, especially for mule deer, on BLM land in Blaine and Phillips counties.

He wondered, though, whether those kinds of opportunities will be available to Northern students in 20 years.

Joel Webster, director of the Center for Western Lands for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Project, said he wasn’t as concerned about a rush to development in the affected areas, but rather that there would “one thousand cuts.”

He said that he feared slowly development would encroach over the years.

Webster said BLM’s option was to ensure that lands remained in their natural state or that they could open the door to development “and let whatever happens happen.”

“Doing ‘whatever happens happens’ is not the Montana way,” he said.

Brian Hockett, BLM’s manager for the project, in talking with reporters later in the day, disagreed with the fears expressed by the outdoors groups.

He said after BLM completed the draft in 2013, the public had a long time to comment on it.

The Montana Wildlife Federation expressed concerns at that time that not enough land would be kept in its natural state, he recalled. The federation listed more land it thought should be included, and BLM agreed to many of their requests.

Hockett said BLM land is basically divided into three categories:

• Land that should be kept in its natural state with no development.

• Land where limited development should be allowed, sometimes with severe restrictions.

•Land where more development, such as energy exploration, should be allowed.

Much of the land in question is in the second category, he said. While some limited development may be allowed, he said, some serious restrictions would be placed on any developers,

And if companies want to develop land for energy exploration, he said, they had to go through rigorous review from BLM.