At some landmark along the 914 mile-long carbon footprint that I used to smear on one or another path connecting Basin, Montana with my home town of Elkton, South Dakota it always dawned on me that some two hundred years ago, in what took a REALLY intrepid pathfinder at least three weeks on a horse (or more likely, two months on foot) to traverse, I would do in about fifteen hours.
I-90, now just another American entitlement, stalks the Yellowstone River between Livingston in the west then abruptly abandons her just east of Billings and plunges southward into the Apsáalooke or Crow Nation.
Despite being sacred to the Apsáalooke the federal government has twice proposed the Awaxaawapìa Pìa or Crazy Woman Mountains sometimes called the Crazies as a location for a national park but half the land and every alternate section was owned by the Northern Pacific Railroad or was otherwise privately held.
Today, most of the public land is shared by the Custer Gallatin and Lewis and Clark National Forests but even tribal access has been blocked by the descendants of European settlers. The Montana Wilderness Association or MWA wants that to change.
On a brisk fall day in 2016, Bozeman resident Rob Gregoire received a trespassing ticket while hunting on a trail that’s appeared on maps of the Crazy Mountains for at least 80 years. Gregoire is now a member of the Crazy Mountain Access Project (formerly the Crazy Mountain Working Group), which includes about a dozen Montanans representing various interests — landowners, conservationists, hunters — who are developing a land swap proposal to resolve disputes over public access along the mountain range’s eastern flank. Crazy Peak is an important part of the spiritual landscape for Crow Indians, and access to it would allow them to fast and pray there in the tradition of Chief Plenty Coups. Switchback Ranch owner and Yellowstone Club member David Leuschen has agreed to give Crow tribal members access to Crazy Peak if the swap goes through. Finally, MWA would like the Crow Tribe or the Forest Service to have first right of refusal on any private lands that come up for sale within the forest boundary. [Checkerboard chess in the Crazy Mountains]Crow Peak or Paha Karitukateyapi just outside Spearditch is translated as "the hill where the Crows were killed" stemming from a battle between the Lakota and Crow Nations. The Crow allied with Custer and the United States Army believing they would reclaim the Black Hills.
ip photo.
The Yellowstone Club wants to turn sewage into snow so that its rich and famous members can ski its slopes in a winter season that’s shrinking because of climate change. #mtnewshttps://t.co/0KD2PGshXV pic.twitter.com/UI7GdX4HQM
— Montana Public Radio (@mtpublicradio) May 16, 2021
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