Although Seeley Lake is known as a town for outdoor recreation, it so far has been lacking any accommodation for organized use of motorized vehicles on the trails.
“There’s one quarter of one mile of ATV trails,” said Curtis Friede, a local businessman who has been working for years to increase forest access for outdoor recreation vehicles. “There are zero mountain bike trails and zero single track for motorcycles, zero.”
The one off-road vehicle that has wide access to the forest lands around Seeley Lake are snowmobiles. While the snow trails are in abundance, Friede couldn’t help but consider that the same trail area wasn’t being enjoyed for the rest of the year.
“I would love to see a mountain bike trail from Missoula to Seeley,” Friede said. “I would love to see a UTV trail that goes from the lower Blackfoot to Seeley Lake.”
About three years ago he made a plan to increase the trail access for recreation sports. He wanted to start a new club of enthusiasts to advocate for the creation of trails specifically for motorized recreation.
He and other members of what would become the Scenic Montana Trails wanted to bring everything together into one group. They folded the snowmobile club and ATV club into one and restarted it all under a different name.
“It’s basically the same people and the same thing going on,” Friede said. “It’s just under a different name. It’s like a rebrand because the IRS would not let us just change the tax ID number.”
They recruited new members as well and held biweekly meetings to strategize and discuss how they would manage to secure some trails for club use.
“Our long term goal is to have fat tire mountain bike riding in the winter along with the snowmobiles,” Friede said. “And in the summer have a few UTV trails and ATV trails with a couple of single tracks for motorcycles and some bike trails for mountain bikes and ebikes.”
It’s a long and difficult process to make changes to public land, and the first step is showing that there is public interest in doing so. The national forest lands in the Seeley Lake area are home to multiple endangered species, and ecologically managed areas that require federal approval to alter or designate for certain uses.
“So the way these things generally work is you do the forest plan first and the transportation plan follows,” said Quinn Carver, the Seeley Lake District Ranger. “If I see opportunities here or there, I’ll try and capitalize on them.”
Some large pieces of the surrounding forest recently came under park jurisdiction through purchases made by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Carver has to facilitate a new forest plan to help determine what can be used for what.
There are some projects already in motion, such as another campground to accommodate an increasing number of summertime visitors, but a lot of the land is around reclaimed logging roads which don’t hold much purpose for conservation and Carver thinks that some it would be well used as new trails for recreation.
Carver believes the best option is a large portion of unused and uninhabited space near Spook Lake.
“Most likely, if we did something down here you’d have a motorized trail that went from June to October, and then there’d be a shutdown period through the hunting seasons,” Carver said. “Then probably to allow the elk to move through there and head to their winter range and then potentially winter season out there as well with it groomed no different than it is right now.”
He suggested that probably the only thing keeping it from happening is funding, and time.
“So if we say, came across a pot of money for motorized trails consideration or whatever, then I would look to probably work through a contract to get it approved by the [National Environmental Policy Act] to where then that loop would become motorized,” Carver said.
The area around Spook Lake doesn’t attract much in the way of outdoor recreation, although it is open to hikers, there isn’t a popular trailhead or ample parking which neither Friede nor Carver seemed to think would be very affected by the addition of some regulated trails.
“There’s enough area for everybody to have access for everything,” Friede said.
“There’s nothing between Placid Lake and the lower Blackfoot, clear off to Gold Creek,” Friede said. “There’s nothing out there are no homes. Why would we not utilize that?“
Scenic Montana Trails hopes to attract the mountain biking communities in Missoula and turn Seeley Lake into a destination for biking, in the same way that the winter trails have made it a destination for snowmobiling.
Although there isn’t an organized opposition, Friede and Carver are both sure that some people will be against the idea of motorized vehicles in the forest land.
“For every person that loves motorized use, there’s ten that don’t and it is public land, so everybody’s voice counts,” Carver said.
But Friede thinks that any environmental wear and tear would be lessened by an organized group.
“There are already people that are doing it. But they’re doing it without permits, doing it without all the legal stuff,” Friede said. “But we can grow and do it right.”
“We want to be self-regulated where all these people understand we’re getting them a place to ride so we need to all do our part and make sure nobody is destroying that forest,” Friede said.
“The people are here. They’re coming here. They’re staying in the woods. They’re staying in the campgrounds. We need to build places to let those people recreate. So they aren’t just off doing recreational things wherever they want to in the forest and destroying things, because that only hurts us.”
Currently Scenic Montana Trails has around 200 members and Friede hopes to get it up to 400 by the end of the summer. Anyone interested in joining the group or donating to the nonprofit fun can visit scenicmontanatrails.org for more information.
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