Nailed it, Steelie.
Buzz, you really don't get it. It's a fact that both BLM and USFS give primary treatment to wildlife and habitat uses above all others, part of that is the court system and the eco-freaks, but the freaks have a lot of willing partners within the agencies. You are one of them, of many, sadly.
As for access, the simple truth is BHA cares only about one class of access, primitive means only, and only for one class of user. It is an exclusive-use model, and it is your right to advocate for it. But cloaking yourself in "public access" is, in practice, dishonest.
As for closures, the Flathead National Forest has about 2400 miles of single-track trails, about 1100 miles of those outside of wilderness, which takes up about half the forest already. I'm fine with the existing wilderness, or was, with the Bob Marshall. But each new addition (Great Bear, Scapegoat) has seemed less wise.
So, out of the 1100 miles of non-wilderness trail, 47 miles are open to singletrack motorbikes. The road system isn't that much better, every side road seems to have a gate 100 yards in, you can't see the gate from the main road most of the time. And we have these road standards, based on old radio-collar surveys done in the early 1990s by light plane. Planes don't fly the mountains at night or during bad weather. So, on nice days, when people want to go in the woods on a nice day, the radio trackers found sow bears got away from the roads. They had maybe 4500 total location data points, no more than 6000 all told.
Well, a few years later, we have GPS sat collars and real time location uploads, hundreds of thousands of data points. Guess what? In the afternoon, Momma Bear is in the weeds with the cubbies. But at 3AM, she and cubbies are booking down the road! And pooping in the road! THe bears are smart enough to avoid humans when the humans are active, while the bears get after it at night. Bears are smart, agency scientists are not. The old, obsolete data still stands as "best available" because the newer stuff would mess up the shut-down, lock up and burn-down agenda.
