“Range Life” from Pavement’s masterpiece, “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain”:

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Off-road vehicles now pose the single biggest threat to America’s public lands and represent a fast-growing law enforcement problem.

That’s the verdict of a new coalition of former public land managers and rangers, which has formed to bring attention to the problem.

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“We’re seeing these vehicles around southwest Montana and we want to be sure folks know that if they’re wider than 50 inches and designed with side-by-side seating, then they’re not legal on trails in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest,” said Bruce Ramsey, supervisor of the 3.3-million acre national forest.

Good article up over at Ralph Maughan’s blog.

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IT is not until after you brave the steep, narrow road, negotiate its hairpin curves, and blink hard while passing its sharp drop-offs, that you begin to understand. At the top, as indigo mountain peaks meet a sea of blue sky, it dawns on you: so this is why they call it the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

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“It’s been thirty years since the last sighting of a black-footed ferret in Wind Cave National Park,” acting park superintendent Rick Mossman said in a prepared statement. “We hope this is the start of a self-sustaining population that will restore a missing link to our mixed-grass ecosystem.”

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The fire, located in the North Fork Sun River Drainage near Sun River Pass, was reported late Wednesday afternoon, said Mike Munoz, the district ranger for the agency’s Rocky Mountain District in Choteau.

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Wildfires have affected only 31,403 acres this year, according to government statistics, and Forest Service spokesman Jim Payne said he could only think of one fire that has prompted evacuations. Most of the 152,423 acres that burned in 2006 had already been charred by this time last year, Payne said.