Photo by Joseph Bullington
Northeast access point to Spotted Dog Wildlife Management Area near Avon.
By Joseph Bullington, mtvigilante.org
“Keep Gate Closed,” reads the sign beside the padlocked gate blocking hunters from a swath of public land. The sign is riddled with bullet holes.
Past the gate and a mile down Jake Creek Road is a state of Montana Wildlife Management Area known as Spotted Dog. The area opened to the public just four years ago but has already become a battleground in an age-old dispute over land use.
Spotted Dog lies five miles northeast of Deer Lodge, in the crook of the elbow where Highway 12 from Helena meets I-90 at Garrison Junction. It is a rare piece of property: prime ranch land that is, now, unranched. The rolling hills are rich in grass and water, obvious necessities for cattle—but also for elk, deer, antelope and the myriad other animals and plants that compose the ecosystem. And Spotted Dog is immense. Vast, grassy prairies stretch for miles, broken only by stream bottoms of rust-colored willows and steep gulches grown thick with ponderosa, fir, juniper, aspen.
In 2010, the state bought the place from the owner of Rock Creek Cattle Company and resort, the billionaire William Foley II.
In the deal, the state got 27,161 acres of prime wildlife habitat for the public to explore and hunt. Rock Creek got more than $15 million and an exclusive lease to graze its cows on the land its had just sold.
But after the state did not renew the lease, the ranch bought land that contains the popular Jake Creek access to Spotted Dog and then locked the public out.
In its 2010 Environmental Assessment, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks argued the importance of Spotted Dog for wildlife habitat. The report called the property “the second-largest block of unbroken native grasslands … held under a single private owner west of the Continental Divide in Montana.”
Antelope bitterbrush and rough fescue are abundant on the property, noted FWP’s Decision Notice on the project. Both, however, “are limited, uncommon, and apparently declining … across western Montana, yet both are exceptionally valuable as forage for elk and mule deer.”
FWP concluded that Spotted Dog, home to the largest concentration of wintering elk in the Upper Clark Fork river basin, is “quite likely among the best remaining winter ranges in Montana.”
In September 2010, using money from the Natural Resource Damage Program, the state bought Spotted Dog from Rock Creek Cattle Company for $15.2 million. Boiled down, their reasons for the purchase were to permanently protect fish and wildlife habitat, protect and enhance wintering range for elk and other big game, protect elk migratory patterns and provide lasting public access.
FWP also bought a 10-year lease for about 10,000 acres of Spotted Dog lands owned by the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. When combined, they form a vast 38,000-acre block of public land in place of the familiar checkerboard of locked-up state sections.
As is clear in the Environmental Assessment and Decision Notice, FWP planned to rest Spotted Dog from livestock grazing to benefit big game habitat and allow damaged areas, particularly stream banks, time to recover.
The Rock Creek Cattle Company owned Spotted Dog for decades, until the family of former ranch owner Ron Yanke sold the place to Foley in 2004 for $33 million. In the deal, the family held onto Spotted Dog for harvest by their company, RY Timber, but Rock Creek got the grazing lease for Spotted Dog with a first-dibs option to buy the property when the logging was done.
Foley also built a spa, a plush lodge called the Cattlemen’s Club, and an 18-hole golf course designed by famed architect Tom Doak and named repeatedly by Golfweek as the “#1 Residential Golf Course” in the nation.
“I loved the idea of a historic working ranch and this beautiful valley,” Foley told the Montana Standard in 2008. What sets Foley apart is that he realized that a lot of other rich people would love that “idea” too, and he set about to buy up parts of Montana and the West, package it, and sell it to them.
The Rock Creek Cattle Company is just one of William Foley’s ventures in Montana.
He has also shown interest in Montana politics—most recently by helping to bankroll U.S. Representative-elect Ryan Zinke’s congressional campaign.
And Foley’s Montana business enterprises are not limited to the ranch. He also bought Big Mountain ski area near Whitefish, which he transformed into the “Whitefish Mountain Resort.” In 2007 he bought the Glacier Jet Center, which houses and services private jets. And he’s founder and chair of the Glacier Restaurant Group, which Foley’s profile on the Fidelity website calls “the largest restaurant business headquartered in Montana.”
“In the east, everyone wants out,” Foley told New West magazine in 2008. “We’ve worked hard all our lives and we’re hitting the age point where we want to get away. We want land and space, want to be in a cool area, maybe not all year around, but we want to be there enough to really enjoy it. We all want life to be what we had as a kid.”
Photo by Joseph Bullington
The gate on Jake Creek Road.
And Foley, for his part, wants to cash in on that desire. As one of his West Point classmates put it to New West, he has a “knack for capitalism.”
In 2010, Rock Creek exercised its option and bought Spotted Dog from RY Timber for $9 million and sold it directly to the state, making a quick $6.2 million profit. Through the deal, Rock Creek also avoided about $30,400 annually in Powell County property taxes, now paid by FWP, as well as costs of property maintenance, including fence repair (FWP planned to spend about $400,000 to repair and rebuild the boundary fence) and treating the noxious weed problem worsened by the timber harvest (FWP allocated $146,000 over five years to fight weeds on the property).
Rock Creek also managed to secure the Spotted Dog’s grass for its 5,000-head cattle operation. Through the purchase agreement, the Cattle Company got a two-year exclusive grazing lease on Spotted Dog for 1,700 cow-calf pairs in 2011 and 1,500 in 2012, at a price of $15 per Animal Unit Month. For the six-month grazing season, this adds to $153,000 for 2011 and $135,000 for 2012.
In effect, Rock Creek transferred the burdens of owning Spotted Dog to the state, made a big profit in the short-term, and continued to use the property as it needed it and had historically used it—as grass for its cows.
In 2012 the grazing lease was nearing its end. The FWP Commission approved a one-year extension. The main reason, according to FWP, was that boundary fences were not yet completed to prevent trespass grazing. With the extension, FWP could at least get paid for it.
Lands Specialist Darlene Edge said Greg Lane, Foley’s right-hand-man in Montana, was unsatisfied and called to request an even longer extension.
Edge remembers telling him, “There’s no way we’re going beyond another year. Period.”
“They weren’t happy,” she said.
That’s when, according to Edge, Rock Creek started looking into buying sections of the old Sam Beck ranch, east and across the interstate from the Rock Creek home ranch and resort.
From the county road, a two-track known as the Jake Creek Road crosses those Sam Beck sections and winds on into Spotted Dog. Since 2011, a Block Management access agreement with the owner, the Pruyn Family Limited Partnership, had kept the route open to the public for the fall hunting season. Under the agreement, FWP paid the owner $4.40 per hunter-day to compensate for the impact of access. In 2013, for example, FWP paid a total of $2,552 for 580 hunter-days.
In March 2014, Foley bought the Sam Beck sections, which comprise 3,227 acres of hay and grazing land. He deeded the land to his California vineyard, Crossroads Winery. FWP staff then approached Rock Creek about renewing the access agreement so the public could continue using Jake Creek Road to get to Spotted Dog.
In the words of Spotted Dog manager Dave Dziak, “They declined the invitation, so to speak.”
The Rock Creek Cattle Company also declined to comment on this story. This reporter called the ranch at least five times, leaving messages for Greg Lane, and also drove to Deer Lodge in part to do an interview with someone at Rock Creek. The ranch backed out at the last moment, and Lane never got in touch.
In October, FWP responded to the access closure with a passive press release: a “popular access site … will be closed to the public this season” due “to a recent change in property ownership.”
The press release was parroted, copy-and-paste style, in Lee Enterprise’s Montana newspapers, but apparently no journalist ever investigated.
Since Rock Creek declined comment, it is impossible to nail down the motive for the access closure. But other landowners have used control of access to pressure FWP to give them what they want.
A landowner recently tried to get 483 acres of land from FWP in exchange for allowing access to the Marias River WMA.
FWP communications director Ron Aasheim also told a story about a landowner near the Missouri River Breaks who offered to trade access to prime bighorn sheep country for sheep hunting tags for himself. FWP declined the offer.
There are no plans now to graze Spotted Dog, said Aasheim. Before grazing ever reopens, FWP would do an environmental assessment to determine if and how grazing would benefit the wildlife habitat—which Aasheim said is FWP’s primary concern. The grazing lease would then be subjected to a “competitive bidding process.”
According to FWP wildlife biologist Mike Thompson, there is “a general interest” among area ranchers in grazing the Spotted Dog. In the bidding process, Rock Creek and other ranches would make offers for the lease. Those offers, though, would not have to be monetary.
“We would look at the offers that provided the most benefit to the wildlife resource,” said Aasheim. “Access could be something (bidders) could offer.”
If an offer were accepted, the grazing proposal would then go through the FWP Commission process, which includes a public comment period, before approval.
Given that FWP’s intention to rest Spotted Dog from grazing is written in the documents, Jason Swant, chairman of the board of the Prickly Pear Sportsmen’s Association, said he thought Rock Creek’s expectations were a little ridiculous.
“It’s not logical (on Rock Creek’s part) to think that ‘we are going to sell this property…but magically we get to have the grass off it,’” said Swant.
Swant cast the decision to close access as a presumptuous blunder: “It seems very shortsighted to have that kind of approach to the public when in reality you want something from the public.” Demand for access and demand for grass to graze are both very high, he explained, and in this case the public owns a large piece of quality grassland.
“Folks who want grazing from the public, they should be in a cooperative way when it comes to sportsmen and access issues,” Swant said.
To Swant, who is a member of the citizen’s advisory council that oversees Spotted Dog, “it will be disappointing if it turns out the Cattle Company ever grazes on there again.”
But no matter what happens in the future, and no matter the politicking that led to this point, community members and hunters and outdoorspeople everywhere have suffered the main consequences of Rock Creek’s decision to close the Jake Creek access. And many of them are angry about it.
While a gate blocking one access road may seem a simple inconvenience, it is more. The swollen horseshoe of land that is Spotted Dog is divided into two parts by a string of private in-holdings. The northwest part is still accessible by Freeze Out Lane three miles north from Jake Creek, but the southeast part, which comprises about two and half times as much land as the other, is now accessible only from the north side, through Avon and Elliston. And from there, because most roads in the WMA were closed to protect habitat, the sections people used to access from Jake Creek now require an extra four to five mile hike.
Jim Buck, who has hunted the Deer Lodge-area for 14 years, said the closure is affecting lots of local hunters, people who have “used that spot for years and years.” It was the Monday after opening weekend of hunting season, and Buck, dressed in a camo long-sleeve t-shirt and jeans, was putting gas in the tank of his old white station wagon.
“It’s happening everywhere, if I’m not mistaken,” he said, referring to the closure. “We’ve gotta make a stand somewhere, or we won’t be hunting.”
At the Boomerang Bakery on Main Street in Deer Lodge, a woman named Kimmy said her family hunted for years on the public and private land now contained in Spotted Dog WMA. She sees the closure of the Jake Creek road as just another step in a decades-long movement toward restricted public access, toward preference for those with money over those who actually live in the community.
“We depend on that meat every year,” she said angrily. “It’s getting to be a rich man’s sport.”
This story has been republished under a Creative Commons license with mtvigilante.org, a project of the nonprofit Big Sky Investigative Reporting. You can see the original story here.
