A potentially dangerous precedent is playing out in a federal district court in Montana, where hunters, anglers and public lands users of all stripes have launched a Hail Mary in order to protect public access to the iconic Crazy Mountains.
Starting in the mid-2010s, the U.S. Forest Service stopped maintaining and protecting prescriptive access routes across a checkerboard pattern of public and private land on the east side of the Crazies. For the Forest Service, it had apparently grown too tiresome to deal with the well-funded private landowners who continually challenged historic easements—easements that are, quite often, the only routes people can take to reach historic fishing and hunting grounds.
“Under Montana law,” reads a 2021 article in the Helena Independent Record, “a prescriptive easement allowing access across private property is established by ‘open, exclusive, notorious, hostile, adverse, continuous, and uninterrupted use’ for a period of five years. Experts estimate thousands of written and unwritten prescriptive easements exist in the state, with a wide variety of purposes including access to livestock on neighboring private property or public recreation access.”
Read more from Hatch Magazine here...
About Montana BHA
The voice for Montana's wild public lands, waters and wildlife