Bell Lake and Bullion Butte

When I was a young man living in Dickinson in the early 1970’s, a friend of mine and I used to occasionally take a drive north of Medora to a place we called the Bell Lake Wilderness (the locals called it the Bell Lake Pasture). We’d drive a little ways off the West River Road onto a two-track trail that led to a little draw with some ash and cottonwood trees alongside Bell Lake Creek. We’d throw our sleeping bags, mostly of the Boy Scouts era, on the ground (no tents or air mattresses for hardy young twenty-somethings) on a quiet summer night and fall asleep under the stars. In the morning, we’d make some coffee on an old white gas Coleman stove, eat a handful of Baker Boy donuts, and take off across the prairie for a long day’s hike.

The Bell Lake Wilderness was about a township full of short grass prairie, part of the publicly owned Little Missouri National Grasslands. There were no roads through it, except a couple of two-tracks used by ranchers who had grazing leases, and not many fences. Open range, mostly, as I recall.

Today, if you drive up West River Road west of the Elkhorn Ranch Site, you’ll see a sign that says “Bell Lake Oil Field,” and you can turn off on any number of bright red scoria roads leading to oil well sites, and storage and pumping stations.

The Bell Lake Wilderness is gone, as are most of the other public land roadless areas in North Dakota. The RARE II study completed in 1979 (Remember that? I still have a copy!) identified 265,000 acres of that public land that were being managed as roadless areas in the Little Missouri National Grasslands—about half of what existed when I first started going there in the early 1970’s. Today there are only about 40,000 of those acres left that the Forest Service still manages as "Suitable for Wilderness." The Forest Service has leased the rest to private companies who have gone in and developed the minerals, building a vast network of roads to connect oil wells and storage facilities with the outside world, and creating a noisy, dusty, thirsty landscape that most of us who went there thirty years ago hardly recognize. Uffda.

Comes now an organization called the Badlands Conservation Alliance (BCA), a small North Dakota-based grass roots organization (full disclosure—my wife is the founder, and I am a member) with a big idea: to save a few small areas still existing as mostly roadless areas, as North Dakota Wilderness. I use a capital W on Wilderness here because we have so little of it in North Dakota, it needs some calling attention to. If you go to BCA’s website and click on the little box in the bottom left hand corner of the home page, you can download a brochure that explains the entire proposal (and you can also become a member for just a few bucks and help their cause).

Theirs is a modest proposal. It would classify those 40,000 acres, plus another 11,500 in the Lone Butte area, where there are no private mineral leases, and 5,000 over in the Sheyenne National Grasslands, as Wilderness. It would be called The Prairie Legacy Wilderness.

Wilderness designation would allow almost all existing uses to continue, but it would not allow any more roads or wells, and it would not allow anyone except the ranchers who lease those acres to drive on the existing two-track trails. The rest of us would just ride horses or hike in these areas. The parcels are small enough that if you take a good long day-hike through each of them, you can see much of the landscape, and get a pretty good sense of why we should save them as Wilderness. I know. I've done it. And seen the Golden Eagle and Prairie Falcon nests and the Prairie Fringed Orchids that are going to disappear one day, soon, if we do not preserve these areas.

There are a million acres of Little Missouri National Grasslands. This proposal would set aside just 5 per cent of them as permanent native prairie. Ninety-five percent--950,000 of those acres--would remain open to oil development under this proposal. The last time I was up on Bullion Butte there was a 4-wheeler rally going on. Under this proposal, they'd have to ride their 4-wheelers on that 950,000 acres that are not off limits to motorized vehicles. That ought to be enough room. That’s a pretty reasonable proposal, don’t you think?

Despite its vast areas of wide open spaces, North Dakota has surprisingly little Wilderness area now—about 40,000 acres, divided among the Chase Lake and Lostwood National Wildlife Refuges and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (If you click on any of those links, you’ll go to great day trip planning sites.)

So why am I writing about this proposal? Well, just last month, South Dakota U.S. Senator Tim Johnson announced that he would introduce a bill in Congress this year to designate between 40,000 and 50,000 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland east of Rapid City, South Dakota, as Wilderness. An area similar to our own Little Missouri National Grasslands here in North Dakota. So some of us think the timing is right to initiate this effort in North Dakota too.

I hope BCA is successful. I hope we get our North Dakota Senators to introduce a bill too. If you want to help, send me an e-mail. Or e-mail Jan Swenson, BCA’s executive director, and ask her how you can help. Or just go ahead and contact your Senators or Congressmen. This takes an Act of Congress. Somebody has to sponsor it. It’s a reasonable proposal. One of them should be willing to get the ball rolling. It’s time to get this done.

It’s too late for Bell Lake. But not for Bullion Butte.