A private plane takes off from Schafer Meadow airstrip in the Great Bear Wilderness. The airstrip was grandfathered into the federal wilderness area, and backcountry aircraft use is now an official part of the U.S. Forest Service planning process. The biggest challenge to backcountry flying is having a place to land your airplane.
That’s why small-plane pilots around the country were celebrating last week when they got official notice that recreational aircraft are now a recognized part of the U.S. Forest Service’s planning process.
While the change doesn’t bring any new resources, it does mean planes get considered along with horse corrals, bike trails, snowmobile routes and other backcountry user needs.
“Our discovery when dealing with the Forest Service was that most of them aren’t pilots,” said Ron Normandeau, a Polson pilot and member of the Recreational Aviation Foundation which fought for the recognition. “Therefore, they lack an appreciation for our training, of the requirements for licensing and maintenance of our aircraft. They’re familiar with four-wheelers and snowmobiles. They deal with them every day of the year. Aircraft are a little different. They only deal with us when they come across one of us at an airstrip.”
About a century ago, Missoula-area pilots and Forest Service staff pioneered backcountry air use as a way to fight forest fires and resupply remote ranger stations. The South Fork of the Flathead River had at least seven air strips at one time. Today there are six recognized landing fields on Forest Service land in all of Montana.
When the RAF started advocating for better recognition, the Forest Service did an inventory of airfields throughout the West. The agency came up with 92, while RAF fliers reported 119.
Recreational Aviation Foundation public lands director Mark Spencer said he ran into the issue the first time he tried backcountry flying.
“The first place I’m going to go, I went to land and there’s a campground in the middle of the runway,” Spencer said from his home in Tucson, Arizona. “I talked to someone in the Forest Service about it, and he said, ‘Where were you and your pilot community when we had two years of discussions on that air strip?’
“The bottom line is pilots were using these strips and nobody knew it. And nobody knew the Forest Service was thinking about closing these things. We realized we better come out of the woods and let people know we’re here.”
For the past two years, the Forest Service has been drafting its Planning Rule – a set of guidelines that tell local forest supervisors how to write forest plans for individual forests. The Flathead and Lewis and Clark national forests (which together oversee much of the Bob Marshall Wilderness) are both undergoing forest plan updates that use the new planning rule.
That means features like the Benchmark airstrip west of Augusta, the Meadow Creek field south of Hungry Horse Reservoir and Schafer Meadows airstrip in the Great Bear Wilderness will all get specific consideration as the new management plans and travel policies are developed.
All three fields existed before the ground received congressional wilderness designation, and all three have been grandfathered for future use.
But that doesn’t mean the fields are universally accepted. A wheelbarrow at Schafer Meadows has drawn controversy because visitors have used it to haul rafting gear to the nearby Middle Fork of the Flathead River – in violation of the wilderness prohibition on wheeled equipment.
Meadow and Benchmark are both outside wilderness boundaries, but frequently get complaints about aircraft engine noise next to a place that, by law, is supposed to have “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”
Normandeau said pilots were aware of their “noise signature” and the RAF recommended keeping it to a minimum. The group has also brought volunteers to repair or upgrade Forest Service airstrips, and recently built the first new one in 50 years at Russian Flats in the Belt Mountains near Martinsdale.
The group has also commissioned a study looking at the effects of airplane noise on wildlife in order to answer those concerns, according to RAF spokeswoman Carmine Mowbray.
“All of this doesn’t mean more access,” Mowbray said. “It means the access we’ve had is documented and part of travel plans, just like snowmobiling, hiking, bicycling and those kind of activities.”
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