Montanans enjoy 11 weeks of elk hunting. This is possible because of an over 100-year-long effort to conserve wildlife habitat. HR 1581, the anti-hunting, anti-elk bill co-sponsored by Rep. Denny Rehberg seeks to undermine that effort, and reduce your hunter opportunity by opening roadless areas to motorized use and increase road building in our national forests.
Everyone worth their salt in the backcountry knows a couple of things:
1. Elk don’t like the sound of engines.
2. The farther you walk from the road, the better the hunting is.
It is supremely ironic that Congressman Rehberg, who constantly claims that we can’t fund money-making programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which provides access to public lands, wants to increase the overall cost of doing business for the Forest Service by making them add more motorized trails to the national forest. Where is the fiscal conservatism in that?
We just got wolves delisted, and now the wolves of Washington are trying to undo all of that hard work. And that’s a damned shame.
Ben Lamb, Helena