The outfitters, the Forest Service and the Fish and Game 

 DepartmenL had some concerns regarding outfitting on national forest 

 land. A committee was appointed by the original forester of northern 

 Region One to work and attempt to resolve these concerns. We have 

 the co-chairman of the committee here in the audience, Darrell Harrison 

 of the Forest Service in Lewis and Clark National Forest. We had 

 rangers from the Lincoln, the new Rocky Mountain Division, the old 

 Choteau-Augusta ranger districts, the Seeley-Swan area and the 

 Spotted Bear area. We had outfitters from western Montana and on the 

 east side, on this panel. C.B. Rich who was the co-chairman with 

 Darrell, was unable to be here. Ralph Hulman, chairman of the 

 Montana Outfitters' Council, Dwane Neal, a past president of the 

 Montana Outfitters and Guides Association and Bob Creek were 

 members, as well as myself, who represented the Fish, Wildlife and 

 Parks Department. 



Now first and foremost, the Forest Service recognizes that 

 commercial outfitters on forest lands are a very viable and important 

 means to transport people for recreational opportunities on these lands. 

 We in the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department recognize the importance 

 of the outfitter as well as the nonresident. Nonresidents, in 1979, 

 contributed 61 percent of the total department budget. Forty-two 

 percent of that budget was from nonresident big game money. I think 

 you want to realize how important these people are to the operation of 

 the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. We strive for 

 cooperation and to work harmoniously in a cooperative effort with the 

 forest agency and the outfitters to resolve difficulties and problems. 

 Our concerns are basically forest definitions from the For^^st Manual and 

 from wilderness policies that had been written from the manual. 

 Sometimes we would argue, almost get into fisticuffs and shout at each 

 other and they were resolved through parliamentary procedure. 

 Perhaps just one word in that definition became a loggerhead: a spike 

 camp, a layover, a base camp, the need and necessity for having 

 corrals, hitch racks, caches, how to define them, where they should be 

 placed and used, should they be taken down after each season and then 

 put up agina when the outfitter went back into his camp first thing in 

 the spring... the different forms that were utilized by the various 

 ranger districts. . .we worked on those forms. They were put into one 

 resolve form that will be used, we hope, to resolve the chaos when an 

 outfitter has permits on two or three different forests and has a 

 different permit on every forest that he is operating on. 



The panel has recommended to the regional forester of Region One, 

 Tom Coston, some solutions to the concerns and to the problems. We 

 realize that this regional forester has another problem since the area 

 also compromises northern Idaho, the panhandle section, as well as this 

 area of Montana. What he finally resolved these definitions into, are 

 going to have to fit for that area also. 



In summary, I would like to say that it was a pleasure to work 

 with these people on the panel. We had some meetings that started in 

 the morning at the Lincoln Ranger Station and lasted into the evening. 

 In fact, the last meeting we had, we started in the morning and we 



