Adventures Of Captain Leonard Part 2
The guys over at Land of No Use (LONU) are complete badasses and possibly out of their minds. The Montana Mint feels honored to post their stories from the deep wilderness of Montana. If you missed Part 1 of the Adventures of Captain Leonard, you can check it out here.
On the road, the search for the easiest access into the mountains began with a faded RV, towing two sputtering snowmobiles. In a corner of the Walmart parking lot, amongst our fellow motor homes and wanderers on layover, we poured over maps, deciphering what roads would take us closest to the roadless and how to save as much personal endurance as possible for Wilderness travel. It seemed funny that we who had set out to ski the less skied and experience Wilderness were so focused on the ease of access. We would drive the RV as far as we could and then snowmobile from there to the roads end, touring onwards into the Wilderness, just for the day, and returning to the snowmobiles and the RV everynight.
Roads largely dictate how we approach the roadless and how we value land. Consider the Going To The Sun road in Glacier National Park. How many people has that brought to an otherwise remote location? How much appreciation has that road garnered for the park and the state of Montana?
Mountain roads are built for many different reasons, but whether it be for resource extraction, residential development, or recreation access, all roads are built to enable human use of the land in one fashion or another.
We used roads and snowmobiled in excess of twenty miles in a day just to get to the Wilderness boundary and scratch surface of what was on the other side.
Perhaps, it was due to the ringing in our ears from the boisterous snow machines, the fact that we hardly saw wildlife, or that we never spent a single night in the wild, but on this trip, in which we used every convenience available, something was lost.
That being said, we did have a great time and our use of roads and snowmobiles clearly enabled us to visit far more areas than otherwise.
The dudes over at Land of No Use made a movie and it is awesome. See the trailer here.
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