Hunting Without Motors

By Howie Wolke

As the autumn air chills and the mountains whiten, Montanans are faced with a dilemma of Shakespearean proportion: “to hunt or not to hunt, that is the question”.

Or is it? For many of us under the Big Sky, and elsewhere, the real question is not whether to hunt, but where. Knowing that the best hunting and the most rewarding experiences lie beyond road’s end and away from the infernal roar of internal combustion engines, we head for roadless areas and designated Wilderness. That’s where the big bucks and bulls are. And anyway, who wants to stalk the wild wapiti in a place where all-terrain vehicles (ATV’s) and dirt bikes churn the airwaves into the audio equivalent of a motocross race? Or where road “hunters” blast game and bushes from the back end of a pickup?

Obviously, hunting’s bottom line is, and has always been, about meat, at least for most of us. Yet in the modern world, game populations would disappear without regulations and limits, and this leads to the big and complex question of ethics. Ethical hunting is a complex topic, with plenty of gray areas. For example, many folks disdain “trophy hunting” but what exactly does that mean? Personally, I hunt primarily for great lean organic meat and for the overall wildland experience, but yes, when I spot a big set of antlers, “buck fever” immediately infects me. So I will take that big buck or bull if the opportunity arises. What about hunters who hunt primarily for the big bull or buck, but utilize the meat and do it all with care and respect? In my opinion, the simple condemnation of “trophy hunting” by many non-hunters, just doesn’t hold water.

For most hunters, the ethic is highly personal. Nonetheless, a few basic principals are commonly agreed upon. First, ethical hunters obey the rules and shoot carefully, not wildly, with the goal of a quick clean kill. Also, they hunt the old-fashioned way, on foot or horseback, which gives some meaning to the term “fair chase”. In addition, these men and women tend toward un-roaded, un-motorized, unblemished, unforgiving, unsurpassed wild rugged country. The kind of country for which Montana is noted – and the kind that differentiates our region from more blemished landscapes such as Indiana. Or New Jersey. Or worse, Texas, where shooting penned-in semi-tame animals passes for a “hunt’, Dick Cheney style.

For great hunting, look no further than the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), which includes a 2.2 million acre no-hunting zone called Yellowstone. The GYE probably provides the best hunting in the world, primarily because of its great habitat characterized by numerous big chunks of roadless area and designated Wilderness. That’s why the GYE produces so many big elk, mule deer, moose, big horn sheep, grizzly, gray wolf and so much more. It’s the wild habitat, period. That wildness is what makes hunting in our region special.

Unfortunately, opportunities for quality hunting wither. During the last couple of decades, something toxic has happened to traditional hunting. An expanding army on increasingly powerful ATV’s now buzzes, rips up and pollutes formerly remote sacred hunting grounds. It’s a sad day when traditional ethical hunters are forced into ever-decreasing wild spaces by lazy and arrogant folks with little appreciation and respect for a tradition that’s as vibrant as the prairie wind, a mountain sunrise, and the sweet scent of sagebrush in the rain.

Yes, arrogant. For what could be more so than thinking that you have the right to damage the land and ruin everyone else’s experience if they’re unlucky enough to be within sight or sound of these noisy stinking contraptions?

Back when there were few logging roads and fewer off road vehicles, hunting required self-reliance. Then came the Forest Service’s massive post World War II road-building/logging binge, and with it, road “hunters”. And with Tokyo/Detroit’s development of expensive ATV’s (elitist machines!), fair chase began to fade. Solitude? Silence? The challenge of hunting in wild rugged terrain? These traditional hunting values slowly melt away, like a mountain snowdrift on a hot June afternoon.

Yet it’s not simply the fault of Tokyo, Detroit and a lazy, ethically-challenged minority. The blame must be shared by the Forest Service and the BLM, for it was these caretakers of the public domain that opened the doors to these dastardly devices. And once that door was ajar, in they roared with a vengeance that now reverberates across the landscape. Once again these agencies have proven their inability to just say “no” to whatever new and damaging activity bangs on the door of our public domain. Really, if conservationists were truly honest, they’d never fail to assert that these phukking machines should never be allowed off-road, period.

Out of the heated pickup, I say, and into the howling wilds, so to speak. In other words, the path to ethical, old-fashioned traditional hunting is really quite clear. Real hunting begins, quite simply, when we leave our motors at the trailhead and head for the backcountry.

This is possible only where roadless backcountry still exists. Despite Forest Service efforts to obliterate these bastions of wild life (from the 50’s through the ’80’s this agency destroyed over a million roadless acres per year, while building literally hundreds of thousands of miles of new logging roads across the country), Montana still has about 6 million acres of unprotected national forest roadless area. These wild spaces, such as the Gallatin Range, the Crazies, Allan Mountain and roadless potential additions to the Absaroka-Beartooth and Selway-Bitterroot Wildernesses, not to mention the Rocky Mountain Front, are, perhaps the Treasure State’s greatest treasure.

And what great treasure might we bestow upon future generations of hunters? That’s simple. The un-motorized roadless wild spaces that still make our part of the world special. That’d be a true gift for the ages, for true hunters from our region and throughout the world, and for all those who still value truly wild land and the unsurpassed life it supports.

So fellow hunters, before you head for the hills to partake in this sacred autumn ritual of the ages, put in a word to protect our roadless wildlands and to keep motor vehicles out of them. After all, our Congressional representatives and agency administrators are paid to listen, and it’s your tax dollars that pay them.

Howie Wolke leads wilderness expeditions across the west, and hunts fair chase.