You could call it the Trout Triangle.
Take a map of Montana. Draw a line from Flathead to Yellowstone counties. Then pencil a line from Yellowstone County to Ravalli County. Add a third line from Ravalli back to Flathead. The geographic triangle you've just drawn almost perfectly incorporates the most economically prosperous parts of Montana.
It's a different story outside the triangle. Towns are shrinking. Jobs can be scarce. Houses often sell at bargain prices.
The triangle encompasses diverse communities - large cities and rural communities, college towns and cow towns, bastions of liberalism and conservatism, communities at the hub of major highways and small burgs off the beaten track. The triangle takes in large areas of Montana on both sides of the Continental Divide.
One thing all these communities have in common is that they're not far from great trout fishing. That's why I call it the Trout Triangle. I certainly don't think communities within the triangle are prosperous just because of fishing. It has more to do with the fact that you tend to find trout in cold, clear rivers and lakes fed by snowmelt from surrounding mountains, rivers flowing through beautiful places with lots of room to swing your arms - and, yes, to backcast.
These are just the kind of increasingly fashionable places where a lot of us choose to live when we have the choice - not just for the fishing, but for the full array of lifestyle and recreational opportunities we have here. Most of you reading this live in my triangle and know or have spent enough time here to know exactly what I'm talking about.
In practical terms, what's far more important than the mere existence of all those trout and all that scenery is the fact that they're at your disposal. They belong to you. Many of the Montanans I know care as much about this as anything else in the world.
And I think that means trouble for the legislators who last week finished killing a useful stream access bill. Senate Bill 78 aimed to affirm the public's existing right to access streams at bridges, where public rights of way intersect the stream. Legislators supporting the bill stood shoulder-to-shoulder with average Montanans. Those who opposed the bill stood on the side of relatively few wealthy landowners, some of them infrequent visitors to our state, looking for any and all avenues to curtail public access in order to claim Montana's trout streams as their own.
It's not just about stream access. Rather, stream access is a proxy for a broader array of issues that boil down to protection of Montanans' culture and quality of life.
Perennial efforts to limit public access to streams amaze me. It's not as if stream access is an area of unsettled law. A pair of rock-solid Montana Supreme Court decisions issued nearly a quarter-century ago form the modern foundation for stream access rights. Those rights have withstood repeated attacks in past sessions of the Legislature, as well as in the courts. Mountain States Legal Foundation challenged the public's stream access rights in federal court, losing and appealing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2003, the nation's high court flicked the appeal aside.
But public access rights still gall some landowners. Some come from states where folks don't have the same rights as do Montanans. Some have great wealth and are accustomed to buying what they want. It must be awful to want to buy something that isn't for sale.
While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 turned back the frontal assault on stream access, the fight continues. Opponents prowl the margins, looking for ambiguity and special circumstances possibly exempt from the law.
In the Bitterroot Valley, for example, a few landowners declared an old river channel called the Mitchell Slough something other than a river and are fighting to keep the public out of it. Elsewhere, especially over in Madison County, a few landowners assert that easements that entitle the public to travel to and across a stream don't entitle the public to step into the stream.
SB78 wouldn't have expanded access rights, but merely clarified them along the lines of a legal opinion issued by the state attorney general. Montanans have the right under the state Constitution to access all waters capable of providing recreational opportunity. You're entitled to roam freely within the normal high water marks of streams. You can't trespass to reach the streams, but you can get to them through public access points, public rights of way and across private land where you have permission.
Bridges built on public rights of way are traditional and perfectly legal access points. Where streams flow through large blocks of private land closed to the public, bridges can be the only real access point.
Bridges also happen to be handy places to fasten a fence to keep the cows in. Many landowners traditionally have done so, even though the fence actually crosses a piece of public right of way and anchors to a public structure. There's no harm in doing it. The only harm is if the landowner attempts to use the fence to do what he isn't entitled to do - preclude the public from using their right of way to reach the stream.
It's unconstitutional for the government to just take somebody's property. So, every right of way for every road and bridge in Montana has been bought and paid for using tax dollars or other valuable consideration provided by the public. Landowners couldn't reach or leave their own property without using easements across land owned by other people and the public. We all honor their rights, and it's not too much to insist they honor our right to use the easements we've acquired to reach our property - streams included.
This issue won't die with the legislation. It'll be back in the form of lawsuits and more legislation - or an initiative, if that's what it takes.
It's not just about bridges and rights of way. It's certainly not just about fishing. It's about the kind of opportunity that attracts and holds so many Montanans - not to mention the millions of visitors who contribute so much to our economy. It's about “eating the scenery,” the “second paycheck” that makes profits and wages available elsewhere seem less appealing. It's about the joy and benefits of living in Montana being available to everyone, not a privileged few. It's about egalitarianism trumping elitism. It's about a whole way of life in Montana that few of us are eager to surrender.
It may not be all that easy for outsiders or some newcomers to understand what it's all about. It's something that eludes the national conservation organization Trout Unlimited. Seduced by the prospect of substantial donations from wealthy landowners who consider the public uninvited guests on “their” streams in the West, Trout Unlimited recently signaled plans to muzzle itself in future stream access disputes. A torrent of protest from its rank-and-file members throughout the West prompted the organization to reconsider its position.
Trout Unlimited has tried to differentiate trout conservation from trout fishing, but, of course, they're inseparable. Trout thrive in the West in no small measure because anglers value them and have protected or restored their habitat. Not every Westerner fishes, but an awful lot do. Support of anglers is not the same, but is very similar to public support in general. There's no keeping the public support if you're indifferent or opposed to the public's rights. Public support for conservation, environmental protection, sound economic policies, enlightened tax policies and everything else that makes Montana desirable and increasingly prosperous connects directly to the public's right to share in Montana's bounty.
Right now, stream access is a political freshet swirling through the Trout Triangle. But a well-kept secret bound to get out eventually is that you can find great quality of life, recreation and other opportunities elsewhere in Montana - far beyond trout streams. As more of Montana gets rediscovered, the triangle's going to grow and change shape. I'm optimistic, for example, about communities along the Hi-Line and in eastern Montana. I think many of them have brighter futures ahead of them. If so, those futures almost certainly will have rivers running through them - and the freedom for people to wade in if they'd like.
Stream access would be worth honoring and defending if it were just about fishing. But it's much more than that. Montana's public right of stream access is something many other states don't have, even elsewhere in the West. Its benefits include broad public support for all the things that make access to our rivers desirable in the first place. It's among the reasons people dream about living here - and why some of the kids who left will one day return.
Spend much time in Montana's Trout Triangle, and you see that quality of life is the key to our region's new prosperity. Greater prosperity comes when more people have access to a good quality of life - not when access to the good life is limited to people who already have all the prosperity they'll ever need.
Steve Woodruff is opinion page editor of the Missoulian.
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