Durfee Hills Update

Amid the growing national threat of public land transfers, hunters in central Montana have scored a conditional victory.

A land swap to consolidate the landholdings of oil billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks of Texas, first proposed in 2012, was dismissed on Jan. 26, 2016, by the BLM following opposition from several sportsmen’s groups, including BHA. The deal sought to trade the BLM-managed. 2,700-acre parcel of the Durfee Hills in central Montana for access to other public parcels isolated by Wilks land. This included improving access to 50,000 acres of BLM and state lands blocked by Wilks land on Bullwhacker Road in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.

Sportsmen say the deal would have sacrificed one of the state’s largest elk herds, estimated at nearly 5.000 head, for less valuable wildlife habitat.

“It was basically removing the public from the elk,” said Doug Krings of Lewistown. Krings organized opposition to the swap through the group Central Montana Outdoors, which delivered a petition to the BLM with 3250 signatures.

John Sullivan, co-chair of the Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, thought the Durfee Hills were inaccessible until Krings invited him to explore the isolated stretch of public land. In 2014, the pair took an airplane to public land few people have set foot on and many hunters don’t know exists.

The pine-forested hills 20 miles southeast of Lewistown are an isolated wild area surrounded by roads and ranches in the valleys below. But the only legal way to get in is by small aircraft.

The Durfee Hills count among the 1.9 million acres of public lands in Montana that are landlocked by private holdings. The Wilks brothers, the largest landowners in Montana, control all roads leading in.

Yet the Durfee Hills are accessible — at least to those hunters willing to pay to be dropped off deep in the backcountry with no legal exit by ground.

Krings hopes more people can experience the Durfee Hills, adding. “Nobody is keeping it a secret.” Last fall, Krings took his 12-year-old daughter into the Durfees. She shot a “little” bull, which still took several trips to haul out by airplane.

Access into the Durfees and Bullwhacker area is unlikely to change anytime soon, but the areas are still public domain. Sullivan sees both these public land areas as accessible, though not easily accessible. “We shouldn’t have to give up public land to have access to other public land,” he said.

Randy Newberg, host of the TV show “Fresh Tracks,” has hunted the Durfee Hills five times. He’s pleased with the victors but says he’ll never hunt there again. On the north side of the BLM parcel, he says the Wilkses have built an impassable fence that effectively blocks the elk herd from using historic trails that lead to the prime bedding ground on public lands.

“You would be hard pressed to convince me that this fencing effort, that has impaired the quality of elk hunting on public land, was not intentionally directed at the hunters wanting to keep the Durfees in public ownership,” said Newberg.

He also sees the land exchange as a “manufactured crisis” by placing the access and public status of two pieces of property against each other. The Wilkses granted access to public land users for Bullwhacker Road in August 2015, during the most recent land exchange proposal.

However, a recent editorial by Farris Wilks in the Great Falls Tribune cited the land exchange cancellation as cause to again bar public access to the Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument through Bullwhacker. The area currently has limited access by foot, horse, boat and aircraft.

“In Montana, hunters are very informed and politically active,” Newberg said. “If this is the way [the Wilks brothers] negotiate, in essence pitching a big fit when they didn’t get their way, their advisers are pointing them down a long, rough road as far as getting things done here.”

Mark Albers, the BLM’s Hi-Line and Lewistown district manager, made the final decision to cancel further exploration of the land swap, based on both the low chance of success and the fairness of the deal to the public.

“You have to have an idea that the values are in line. Acre for acre there was a disparity,” said Albers.

Albers hopes to work out a deal with the Wilkses that would allow more access to public lands with a different, less controversial approach. To start, he will ask the Central Montana Resource Advisory Council to define what kind of access is needed at Bullwhacker Road

“This whole discussion served to open my eyes to what we term ‘access,’” Albers said, adding that shared boundaries require cooperation. “I hope that this process continues with good faith on all sides.”

“I was happy to see it taken off the table,” said Sullivan, who expects another land swap proposal in the future. “My definition of success is that [the BLM] would reject all trades for the Durfee Hills.”

This article was originally published in Backcountry Journal Spring 2016