Guest opinion: Protecting and accessing our Treasure State | Opinion

There are so many resident Montanans, like myself, who can’t get enough of our Big Sky sunrises or sunsets. We live for fly fishing Young’s Creek in the Bob Marshall or canoeing the Wild and Scenic Missouri below Fort Benton. So when our great Glacier National Park adopted an entrance system that would require you and I to be lottery winners before we can even enter our own park, I knew Montana has changed for the worse.

Montana outdoors has slowly moved in the wrong direction over the past three decades. House Joint Resolution 13 (2015) was a study done by Montana state government. It found that since the mid-1990s, over 21,000 miles of roads to access our public lands had been blocked. We used to manage our forests; now a lumber mill is an endangered species and a sheet of OSB is $50. Try today to get a camping spot at one of our state park campgrounds, and you will be met with frustration. Even 15 years ago I could get a backcountry hiking permit in Glacier on Wednesday and by Friday we were headed to Hole-In-Wall campsite to make perfect Montana memories.

I understand our state has been discovered, and we can’t stop that. I enjoy meeting new friends and completely sympathize with out-of-staters who want to move here. I would be here in a heartbeat if I was born in Kansas. (No offense to my Jayhawk friends). But when year after year we Montanans see our outdoors changing, access restricted and costs increasing, it is time we start pressing back.