08/04© Ronald L. Moody (2004)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

‘No Road Equals No Access’
A Dead-End For Public Hunters

Tiz a rare American hunter, indeed, who never dreamed of leading a pack string of horses up into the high wild mountains of our nation’s great National Forests. The ghost of Jack O’Connor may lead our dream toward a big horn ram; perhaps the spectre of Ted Trueblood points toward a wilderness elk.

But the dream sparked by the long-gone outdoor writers of our youth can still color our hopes so long as those unroaded wild backcountries exist to give the dream a place to live.

I hate to make a rude awakening but the latest events in a hundred-year struggle to preserve a few fragments of a once wild continent may be coming to an end. And your dream of a wilderness hunt may need a forwarding address.

Roadless Areas

Those unroaded back countries I mentioned consist of about one in every12 acres of our National Forests and BLM lands (58 million acres of the 485 million acres of federal public lands). Moreover, roadless areas are fragmented into thousands of small-to-large parcels of 5,000 acres or more scattered across the national landscape. The vast majority are located in the great national forests of the Rocky Mountain region. Montana has about 5 million roadless acres.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton signed an order putting these “roadless areas” off limits to new road construction. At this writing, President George Bush has proposed a new rule to effectively re-open these roadless areas to road building to support logging.

So What? What does the Joe Average American hunter have to lose in this obscure bit of Washington bureaucratology?

For the typical public hunter the existence of roadless areas within our National Forests and BLM land has three main benefits.

1. Many studies have shown that the number of trophy class male game animals is inversely proportional to the proximity of roads where firearm hunting is allowed. That means, the more roads in an area, the fewer and younger the bucks, rams and bulls will be, and the smaller their antlers and horns will be. Producing and keeping trophy class game on public land requires some kind of protection from motor vehicle hunters.
2. Public land hunters who hope to kill a trophy buck or bull virtually always seek their opportunity either in roadless areas or nearby. It’s no secret that trophy animals get big and old by being smart. An experienced hunter knows that the big guys move quickly away from high hunting pressure to places where few hunters intrude. The places they seek are called ‘security habitat.’ In the American West, security habitat on public land comes in two different varieties - roadless areas and areas where firearm hunting is either limited or restricted entirely. (In the past, bowhunting has not been much of a factor in forcing trophy game to leave security habitat. As more people become bowhunters, however, and, especially, as bowhunters insist on using more technically advanced equipment, some game animals are moving in response.) Trophy game moves quickly to adjacent posted private land when neither of these two kinds of security areas are found on public land. There, they are hunted almost exclusively by a few wealthy clients of outfitters and friends of the landowner.
3. The third benefit of roadless areas to public land hunters is the opportunity to experience American hunting in a wild and primitive setting away from our normal loud, odious industrialized way of life.
   Even a small Eastern woodlot can become a wilderness in one’s imagination. But real, big, honest-to-God wild places are becoming largely absent on public lands as more hunters use motor vehicles on the roaded forests and plains. Loss of our remaining roadless areas will mean the closing of a real frontier for those of us not rich enough to buy exclusive access by way of private lands.

Do No Roads Equal No Access?

The most common argument one hears why public land hunters should support President Bush’s plan for building roads in roadless areas is that “no roads equals no access.” The slogan in every mouth is that not building roads in remaining roadless areas means “the government is locking people off the public land.”

I suppose it’s true that a person who is too weak-legged or lazy to walk a mile or two is effectively prevented from accessing land where they cannot drive their SUV within rifle range of a shootable game animal. The threshold of access defined in the concept of “no road equals no access” certainly reveals a great decline of American manhood. A decline that is in stark contrast to the standard of hunting as a path to “vigorous manliness” cited by Theodore Roosevelt at the time he was forcing Congress to accept the creation of the very National Forests now being jeopardized.

(lady hunters please be patient here...)

Certainly the “no road equals no access” argument implies that hunters are weaker and less able as individual persons than virtually any other group of public land users.

Most disgusting is when able hunters promote their own convenience by using truly disabled hunters as an excuse for building roads in wilderness or roadless areas. There are a number of programs available in Montana and other states to provide quality hunting experiences for disabled persons that do not require new road construction.

The vast majority of public land hunters actually hunt on the nearly 400 million acres of heavily roaded federal “multiple-use” lands that surround roadless areas; few of them actually venture into roadless areas or wilderness areas.

Wilderness hunters, those who find happiness by hunting no place other than a roadless or wilderness area, are a small (though passionate and vocal) minority of the hunting community. The real test for the vast majority of public land hunters who may never actually hunt in a roadless area is to understand that roading on multiple-use lands is a separate issue from the intrinsic value of the smaller roadless areas to all hunters. The existence of roadless areas benefits hunters regardless of whether they actually hike into the roadless area or simply hunt the game on nearby multiple-use land that is produced or sheltered by the roadless area.

In a previous Nimrod’s Trace, I discussed at length the relationship of hunters, roads and wildlife on multiple-use lands. The guiding idea I recommended was one of “just enough roads on public lands to provide adequate access - but not a mile too many.”

A typical urban-dwelling weekend hunter is much more likely to find an attractive, attainable hunting opportunity on road-accessible multiple-use lands. This class of access is important because keeping millions of casual weekend nimrods as active hunters is vital to the future of hunting and wildlife in America.

But these hunters whose lifestyle forces them to drive from home into public lands in order to park and hunt on multiple-use lands owe much of their dream of taking a trophy game animal to the existence of nearby roadless areas. They definitely have a dog in the fight to save roadless areas.

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com

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