Read some sobering news last week on Joshua Bergen’s blog TroutBugs in a post he titled Incident at Milesnick’s Could Reignite Debate.
We’ve spent a fair amount of time chewing this one over and debated whether or not to post anything about it last week, though the more we think about it, the more pissed off we get. Kudos to Josh for getting the word out first.
Here’s the issue in a nutshell as reported by Josh….
I heard this morning that an angler on the MZ-Ranch – better known as Milesnick’s – was recently electrocuted when his fly rod touched a power line. It is a horrible, unfortunate incident about which details are sketchy, but Tom Milesnick confirmed to me via e-mail that there is a lawsuit pending from the angler or his family, and that he could not comment further.
He also confirmed that access to fishing and hunting on all of their properties has been suspended pending the outcome of the lawsuit. If the outcome favors the unfortunate angler, they may never allow access again.
The Milesnicks allow access to two spring creeks on their property north of Belgrade, Montana for a fee, and have a sign-in system that allows anglers free access to their property on the East Gallatin
River.
They have a longstanding record of cooperation and allowing access to anglers. They are model landowners from sportsmen’s perspective, which is why burning the bridge to them would set a scary precedent for the other pay fisheries including Armstrong’s, Depuy, and Nelson’s spring creeks in Paradise Valley and other creeks and lakes on private property statewide. Moreover, it sets us up for another stream-access battle.
None of our team knows the Milesnicks personally, though they have a tremendous reputation in the area for working cooperatively with anglers (and we’ve ogled their healthy pheasant population for years) and for working to be thoughtful, sensible stewards of their river and riparian resources.
Josh appropriately pointed out that while on one hand it’s probably a fool’s errand (my words) to comment on a situation like this (a tragic accident with injury or death) when the bulk of the hard details aren’t known, it’s a damned shame to see this happen.
With Montana’s most recent stream access hostilities earlier this year fresh in local anglers’ and landowners’ collective minds, a situation like this is simply fuel for the next skirmish in the access war (which is no doubt coming at some point).
[Point of disclosure – several of us blogging here at Chi Wulff are hip deep in a business venture buying and selling land parcels around the country. We’re incredibly aware of and sensitive to the liability issues facing landowners today. We’re not, as we were accused back in March, “fly fishing socialist faggots who hate” the landed aristocracy.]
That said, we’d simply like to tell the Milesnick’s we’re behind you, and we’re deeply appreciative of your land and waterways having been available and accessible in years past. We hope they will be again.
That said, we’ll add our voices to the growing chorus of those amazed at how out of touch our society seems to be with the greater outdoors. One fly fishing blogger has even suggested incidents like this (and people calling 911 after getting lost in orchards and corn mazes…) signs of the ‘outdoor apocalypse’.
Maybe he’s right, though we have a bevy of other much more colorful names for it.
Whatever transpired during this incident at the MZ won’t be restored by legal extortion or soothed over by dollars paid in settlement. As distasteful as we find it, we fully understand that there’s an entire industry in our country through which a certain breed of attorney extracts money from one party as the result of another party’s negligence.
We just think it’s a damned shame.
