My Page: Hal Herring

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Groundwater/Surface Water Connectivity

The Montana Supreme Court this week decided in favor of Trout Unlimited and eleven other petitioners, among them flyfishing guides, outfitters and landowners along the Smith River, in a long-running lawsuit over water rights in the Upper Missouri basin, of which the scenic Smith River is a part.

Just another water rights battle in a state where water has been the subject of court cases, feuds, fistfights and murders ever since white men decided to try farming dry country. Right?

Wrong. With the new decision, the state Supreme Court has recognized the concept of "connectivity," of ground water to the surface waters in rivers, opening a can of worms that will have far-reaching effects for agriculture, development and recreation in Montana. [more]

Balancing Act

Chinese acrobats! The call came from friends in Ovando. They were going to Great Falls to see a group of Chinese acrobats called the Golden Dragons and we were invited. I could not tell right away whether this was a good thing or not. Very few acrobats of any nationality visit Great Falls, and it seemed crazy to miss them. And yet… We would have to leave early on a Saturday to eat dinner and catch the show at the Civic Center -- a civilized place where beers are pointedly not served. I thought of reasons to escape the trip. The early spring world is lit with possibility. What if I wanted to fish the newly ice-free reservoir until dark? What if a call came in for some end-of-season skiing? Little gophers were popping out everywhere on the prairie like a whack-a -mole game and my rifle was sighted in for 200 yards. Schedules were bad enough in winter, in spring they were torturous. So were my family’s questions. Yes, I wanted my children to see Chinese acrobats and no, I had no idea when the chance would come again. No, I did not imagine that we would be on a long hike and look into a coulee and see acrobats cavorting among the chokecherries. We would see them cavorting in the Civic Center or not at all. Yes. I guess. [more]

The Creature of McCone County, Part II

In Eastern Montana, permits had been issued and a plan formed to take care of a wandering creature, wolf or not, that had killed 36 sheep and injured some 71 more. But the level of frustration in the prairie communities continued to build, further feeding a divide between two cultures -- one rooted to the land the animal was wandering, and the other filled with regulations designed to protect the animal.

Some of the first questions about how to deal with the stock-killer concerned the CM Russell Wildlife Refuge. Among the least popular of the federal government's many, many unpopular endeavors in the region, the CM Russell's one million acres (including the vast acreage of the surface of Fort Peck Reservoir) has been a flash point since it was set aside as a "game range" in 1936, following the general exodus of human population from the region in the wake of the Dust Bowl years. Among the extremely hardy agricultural people who did not leave, who stayed on, year after year, building larger and larger holdings in order to survive, there is ongoing suspicion that the Refuge, which has been the site of prairie dog town recovery (an idea that disgusts many ranchers who have battled the rodents for decades) is also the secret site of wolf re-introductions. [more]

The Creature of McCone County, Part I

The creature, whatever it is, came out of Montana's own McCone County, wandering from the rough breaks of Timber Creek, just south of the Big Dry Arm of Fort Peck Reservoir, and the CM Russell Wildlife Refuge. Where it had wandered before that, Canada or North Dakota, nobody knows.

Since December, it has struck six herds of sheep belonging to stockmen in McCone and Garfield Counties, killing 36 ewes, and injuring 71, many of which will succumb to their wounds. It leaves a track like a small wolf, or a dog, or a wolf-hybrid, but its killing habits are inefficient, nothing like the surgical lethality of a wolf taking meat from a herd of domestic sheep.

Where it has stopped to kill, over an area of more than a hundred square miles, it has created a fury, one that is not entirely directed at the creature itself (the stockmen here know full well how to handle that problem) but at the federal and state governments, at complex regulations imposed to protect an animal that they despise, and at a far-away society that seems to have lost all respect for them and their constant struggle to remain self-reliant, solvent, and on the land. [more]

Inside the Interior

The Department of Interior will announce the formation of the Sporting Conservation Council today, a group of men and women drawn from prominent shooting sports and hunting organizations. According to the press release:

"The council will provide important input in the areas of habitat restoration and protection; the impact of energy development on wildlife resources; forest and rangeland health; hunting access to federal lands; and other issues in which the sporting and conservation community can provide a valuable perspective to resource managers and senior leaders throughout the department…" Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton says, "We wanted to find a way of institutionalizing the role of sportsmen and women in the decision-making process at Interior. Now, for the first time, sportsmen and women will have an officially sanctioned committee to advise Interior on issues important to them and the country."

It would be easy, but a mistake, to view the formation of the Sporting Conservation Council with paralyzing cynicism. First, let’s grant that the council can be defined by who is not on it. [more]

A Changing Trade

I don’t hunt shed horns with the same fervor as I used to. In the years since I lived in the Bitterroot, as prices hit $9 during the mid-90’s it all became a bit too much of a circus. Shed hunters became so aggressive that they stampeded elk on the game ranges, right at the hardest part of the winter when the cow elk and doe mule deer were bred and fat supplies at their lowest.

Snowmobiles and ATVs inevitable entered the game. It was the most familiar of American trajectories. If a few shed horns is good, wouldn’t several truckloads be even better? And think how many more we could get if we used our brains, and strung a tight, head-high cable between those aspens before we rushed the herd! State wildlife officials made the decision in the late 1990’s to close the game ranges from the end of hunting season on December 1st through the 15th of May.

The same public feeling that generated the idea to purchase the lands in the first place -- that wildlife was an integral part of Montana --seemed to spill over in an unusual public willingness to let the ranges serve their original purpose. I was all for the closures and so was just about everybody I knew, but you could feel the shift. I lived at the western border of the Calf Creek Game Range, and had walked there almost every day, every winter. A little bit of freedom had drained away from the freest place I had ever lived. [more]

Commentary

One of the newer conservation groups in the West is the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP), a group dedicated to the tradition of hunters and fishermen as pragmatic conservationists, speaking out for protecting habitat and watersheds where wildlife can thrive, and where hunting and fishing can be preserved even as population and development pressures soar. The group invokes the name of Teddy Roosevelt to underscore its message of tough-minded sportsmen acting for conservation -- this is no bunch of wild-haired Earth First!ers, no pencil-necked urban Sierra Clubbers or bird-watchers who quail at the sight or thought of blood.

In fact, TRCP has a distinctly Republican flair. That such an organization has questioned the Bush administration's agenda regarding the environment and the public lands has thrown at least one writer, at a major western newspaper, over the precipice. [more]

Accident as Metaphor

I wanted to keep quiet about the Dick Cheney shooting accident, but I guess I can’t make myself do that. I listened yesterday to all the frivolity and the holier-than-thou jokes from the non-hunters, and the how-could-anyone-be-so-careless raps from the shooters, and I held my tongue. I live in a glass house as far as all that goes, and am not going to be chucking those rocks. I’ll never forget putting a .22 round the length of my lower leg and into my ankle while plinking raw eggs off the wood pile in my yard, or the nothing-else like-it whirr-buzz of shot going past both sides of my head in an incident that sounds very close to what happened to Cheney and his friend.

I’ve watched two school friends recover from accidental shotgun wounds – one lost his spleen and left eye, the other watched as a deer pursued by dogs crossed a road in front of him, and then saw the smoke coming out of the shotgun of the hunter on the other side of the deer, the muzzle pointed straight at him, the double-ought buckshot kicking up puffs of dust from the surface of the road until some of them reached him and flattened him, breaking his leg. [more]

Sex, Money and Meth Addiction

“Sexual addiction is comparable to other addictions in that the behavior is out of control and takes over your life," said Dr. James Myers, a Libby, Montana, based psychologist who specializes in working with sexual offenders. As part of a pre-sentencing agreement, Myers was asked to evaluate Dick Dasen and assess both his potential for rehabilitation and the risk, if any that he posed to the community of Montana’s Flathead Valley if he were sentenced to treatment rather than imprisonment for his five sex related felony convictions.

At days end, Dasen received a sentence that combined a dose of both treatment and prison. Judge Stewart Stadler sentenced Dasen, who is sixty three years old and was once one of the valley’s most prominent businessmen and philanthropists, to a combined total of twenty years, with eighteen suspended. The sentence guarantees that Dasen will spend at least twenty months in the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge. [more]

Sex, Money and Meth Addiction

Flathead businessman Richard A. "Dick" Dasen, the man convicted last spring of luring numerous women -- many of them methamphetamine addicts -- into a ring of sex-for-money agreements, will spend 20 months in the Montana State Prison for the crimes.

Dasen was sentenced today in Kalispell to two years in Deer Lodge without paroll, but with credit given for the 117 days he's already spent in the local jail. He was also sentenced to 18 years to the Department of Corrections but all of that sentence was suspended.

Last May, a jury convicted Dasen on one misdemeanor and five felony charges, including promotion of prostitution and sexual abuse of children. He was acquitted of seven other charges, including two of the most serious -- sexual intercourse without consent and aggravated promotion of prostitution. The sexual abuse conviction alone carried with it a 100-year maximum sentence but no minimum.

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