Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument

The Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The Final Resource Management Plan and Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is expected in October 2007.

In January 2001, President William J. Clinton designated the Upper Missouri River Breaks, including the river, as a National Monument. That designation covers 377,000 acres of public land along the Missouri River in central Montana and defined the values for which the Monument is to be managed. Like the Wild and Scenic River, the Monument designation is intended to protect wildlife, historic sites, and geologic features, as well as scenic values and the opportunities to experience remote settings.

The National Monument designation was a good start toward providing lasting protection of a unique Montana landscape – but only if the Bureau of Land Management adopts a Resource Management Plan that genuinely protects the values for which the Monument was created. The Resource Management Plan specifies how the intent of the National Monument designation will be fulfilled in actual practice.

In Montana, there are some 8 million acres of BLM land open to multiple use management. There is not a single non-motorized segment of the entire 2,300 mile long Missouri River. The 377,000 acre Missouri Breaks National Monument was established foremost to safeguard its abundant natural and historical attributes and thereby provide some balance to BLM’s multiple use management approach.

The Montana Wilderness Association recognizes that a range of resource and recreational uses are appropriate for the Monument, and in fact are sanctioned by the Monument Proclamation. But we also feel the Proclamation provides clear direction to protect the values that make the Monument a special landscape above all else.

The Montana Wilderness Association supports a plan that provides motorized access into the Monument, but also creates large blocks of motor-free, unroaded, and largely undeveloped land to protect wildlife and provide opportunities for the public to experience scenic and remote settings. In keeping with the values of the Wild and Scenic River designation, MWA also supports at a minimum, a season-long, non-motorized segment of the wild and scenic sections of the river.

Unfortunately, we see little in BLM’s proposed Management Plan for the Monument that will distinguish the Breaks landscape from other BLM lands. Although no final decisions have been made, discussions with BLM officials and at interdisciplinary team meetings continue to point to the kind Resource Management Plan one would expect on other BLM lands – not a National Monument.

The Current Preferred Alternative

Backcountry Recreational Airstrips

• The BLM’s current preferred alternative for the Monument calls for 6 backcountry recreational airstrips. They would be concentrated in the interior uplands of the Monument, characterized in the Monument Proclamation as “some of the wildest country on all the Great Plains.”
• For a Monument celebrating wildness and solitude, and honoring Native American and pioneering history still evident on a landscape “as remote and nearly as undeveloped as it was in 1805” (quoting the Proclamation) when Lewis and Clark traveled through it, airstrips are incompatible with the purposes for which the Monument was established.
• Airstrips will create maintenance, monitoring, and liability issues for the BLM. They will also establish a precedent creating use expectations and pressures for other federal land managers.
• It is noteworthy that among the other 14 NLCS Monuments, there is only one public use airstrip (in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, serving the town of Boulder).

Roads

• The Monument landscape has an extensive network of mostly user-created roads and two-tracks. While BLM is taking steps to close some of these, its closures are based on a very permissive definition of “road” which fails to address the density problem.
• By the BLM’s current preferred alternative, the Monument’s remaining 618 mile road network (even after proposed closures) will be far in excess of an appropriate balance for a National Monument. Fully 75% of the Monument will remain within a half mile of a road, and 97% will be within a mile.
• We believe this plan overemphasizes motorized access at the expense of providing reasonable access for visitors seeking non-motorized experiences, and, more important, for safeguarding Monument values, including wildlife and historical sites. For a Monument established to promote quiet, solitude, and connections with our frontier past, the proposed road density is excessive, especially as visitation and road use inevitably increases. We believe the BLM should be closing more roads, many of which have no legitimate transportation purpose.
• Roads providing Monument access only through private land, and roads impacting the Monument’s Wild and Scenic River corridor, should also be addressed.

National Wild and Scenic River Management Plan

• The entire 2,315 miles of the Missouri River is currently open to motorized boat use. We feel that a portion of the Monument should be designated motor free, especially with canoeing representing about 85% of current use.
• The BLM proposed a three-month summer restriction on motorized boating on the lower half of the river in the draft Resource Management Plan, but that restriction has now been further narrowed and reduced to only several days of the week out of that seasonal period.
• The BLM has indicated that it will address growing motorized use at a later date if necessary through adaptive management.
• We believe any future motorized use limitations will be much more difficult to implement, and that the unique paddling opportunity offered in the Monument today should be preserved while that option is still possible.

Oil and Gas Development

• Oil and gas development of leases that were valid when the Monument was established are an appropriate resource use for the Monument, as noted by its Proclamation.
• However, we believe that exploration and development standards should be considerably more rigorous within the Monument than would be the case on BLM land outside of the Monument. Unfortunately, a review of proposed stipulations indicates little difference.
• Gas exploration and production activities have shown a recent dramatic increase on BLM land adjacent to the Monument. This activity was not projected in the RMP planning process. The BLM’s RMP fails to consider the cumulative effects of activities that would be allowed in the Monument with increased gas development just outside of it.

Cottonwoods/Riparian Health

• The Monument Proclamation cites “a fully functioning cottonwood gallery forest ecosystem that is rare in the Northern Plains” as one of the special “objects of interest” for which the Breaks was deemed worthy of Monument designation.
• The draft RMP acknowledges that the future of cottonwoods in the Breaks is in jeopardy due to limited regeneration. Along almost two-thirds of the 149 mile Missouri River corridor through the Monument, in fact, there are “no sapling/pole stage cottonwoods except on islands.” (Chapter 3, p. 153)
• Besides simply noting the problem, the RMP fails to consider management options that could be implemented to insure that cottonwoods will continue to be part of the landscape in the future.

Collection of Specimens and Artifacts

• The Monument Proclamation declares that visitors shall not “appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of this Monument.”
• The BLM’s preferred alternative authorizes the collection of invertebrate fossils and petrified wood, with the rather remarkable proviso that the total removed by one person may not exceed 250 pounds. That is the same standard used on other BLM lands.
• We believe the values of the Monument, including geological curiosities, cultural and historic sites, and well preserved homesteading artifacts, would be better safeguarded if BLM were fostering a “leave it as you find it” ethic for Monument visitors.

Monument Boundary

• In 2004, the BLM decided that all maps of the Monument issued by the agency for the public would not show the Monument boundary.
• While this policy may please opponents of the Monument, it confuses the public about access and invites conflicts with private property owners within and adjacent to the Monument. The policy is also bound to discourage cooperative federal-state-private resource management initiatives relative to watershed protection, historic and cultural site preservation, weed control, and other possibilities. Doing away with the boundary also sends a signal to the public that the BLM is not excited about the Monument and its stewardship. Rather than promoting one of the gems of the NLCS, the agency seems to be hiding it.

Monument Proclamation

• The BLM is unwilling to put the mandate of the Proclamation, calling upon the agency to safeguard the Monument’s natural and historic values, above “multiple use.” Numerous references to the Proclamation and multiple use occur through the RMP, suggesting BLM views both as directives it must follow equally for the Monument.
• We do not believe that the BLM can safeguard the values of the Monument with a management policy for the Monument that tries to be “all things to all people.”