Landowners locking out hunters

YAKIMA – It took years of mounting frustration, but Ken Williamson finally had enough.

And state wildlife officials have reason for concern, because he’s one of many landowners feeling that way.

Williamson owns about 280 acres straddling State Route 410 between Naches and the Nile Valley. It has long been a prime area for hunters, and even more so for anglers, since Mud Lake sits just over the hill beyond his property. About a mile of the gravel road leading to the lake, including the entrance off SR 410, runs right across Williamson’s property.

For years, he put up with the thousands of dollars of vandalism, the relentless garbage-dumping, the all-hours gunfire and poaching, not to mention the dangers created by irresponsible hunters who didn’t seem to care that the Williamson family’s homes might be in the line of fire.

Once, Williamson’s son David – who has a home on the property – heard shots just up the road during a non-hunting season, went up to investigate and found himself almost in the line of fire of several apparently inebriated individuals who had decided to kill a bighorn sheep.

And then there were the ones who weren’t hunting, just shooting up there at all hours – sometimes with fully automatic weapons.

Ken Williamson put up with it because, he said, he knows that it’s only a “very, very small percentage of people (who are) going to ruin it for everybody.”

Finally, they did.

Last New Year’s weekend, David Williamson came home and found that his home and his brand-new car had been hit with buckshot. That’s when Ken Williamson decided to gate the road – legally, on his own land – for the first time.

Williamson, himself a former hunter, didn’t want to do it. He had hoped state officials would do whatever was necessary to assure better law enforcement response to the unsettling activities on his property. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has few enforcement officers, yet Williamson said he has been routinely told by sheriff’s personnel, “That’s a fish-and-wildlife issue.”

Oak Creek Wildlife Area manager John McGowan, who oversees much of the state land around the Williamsons’ property, is sympathetic to their concerns.

“When you talk to him, and hear all they’ve had to deal with, it’s easy to see his side of it,” McGowan said. “Of course, the public doesn’t see it this way. You’ve got people writing to the Fish and Wildlife Commission saying, ‘They can’t do this,’ and threatening to sue because they say it’s their right, they’ve been going up there for years and now there’s no access.”

Along the South Fork Cowiche Creek, Van Wyk Ranches took part in the state’s “Feel Free to Hunt” program for more than 15 years. The ranches’ 4,600 acres were prime habitat for deer, elk and upland birds, grouse in particular. But after years of vandalism and garbage, after cut fences and property signs shot full of holes, the ranch’s “Feel Free to Hunt” signs were replaced last year with “No Trespassing” signs.

The same thing has happened in at least two long-popular hunting areas in the Manastash Ridge area, including Shell Rock, where private owners – who for years have allowed access across their property to the public lands beyond – have gated the roads.

“People are starting to say, ‘Enough’s enough,’ ” said state wildlife habitat biologist and avid hunter Ken Bevis. “And a portion of the public is not willing to accept that; they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, this has always been public land’ – even when it wasn’t – and they’re resistant to that change of having restrictions put on them.”

Eventually, Bevis said, “landowners say, ‘Forget it.’ And I’m not sure I blame them.”

Some hunters are feeling squeezed out.

George Shockley, an archery hunter from Sunnyside, has seen several areas he’s traditionally hunted in Klickitat County become closed to hunters over the past decade – particularly during the late archery season. And many of those closures, including a recent one involving several roads within the Klickitat Wildlife Area, take effect at the beginning of November, all but wiping out the late archery season.

The closures in other areas, he said, have increased hunting pressure in the Soda Springs portion of the Klickitat Wildlife Area, where now side roads into the best hunting land are gated off. Hunters can walk in, but hiking many uphill miles isn’t an attractive option for 70-year-old Shockley.

Ken McNamee, a district manager with the Department of the Natural Resources, said his agency has received a lot of phone calls from hunters angry about being unable to reach state lands in areas where private landowners have gated roads across their property.

“The landowner has every right to do that,” McNamee said, noting that some long-time users believe they have just as much a right to the access they’ve always enjoyed.

“Some of these folks have been using these (roads) to get to campsites for two, three … four generations. And all of a sudden a road is closed, there’s a gate across it or whatever, and they feel like they’ve been booted off their property.”

Proposed land exchanges between Western Pacific Timber and the Department of Natural Resources would preserve access to vast areas in the Umtanum and Wenas. And other campaigns, such as the wildlife department’s partnering with Nature Conservancy to acquire 10,000 acres within the Oak Creek and Tieton area has ensured that several key access and hunting areas – including Bear Canyon – will remain open to the public.

And, there are still “significantly more” free-to-hunt private lands available to hunters than there were a decade ago, said state wildlife private-lands biologist Mike Keller.

“In Franklin County alone, in the dryland area there was no feel-free-to-hunt ground (in 1998), and now we’ve signed up about 50,000 acres,” Keller said.

Many of the gains have been thanks to the Conservation Reserve Program, in which farmers have received government funding to remove their agricultural land from production and focus on environmental and wildlife habitat enhancement.

Most landowners signed 10-year contracts, most of which will be coming around for renewal over the next one to three years. And with grain prices at record highs and with some landowners’ frustration also reaching a peak, Keller said it’s all the more critical for hunters to be on their best behavior on private land.

“All over Eastern Washington, these contracts are going to start expiring, and a lot of whether these people are going to stay in the program or not is going to hinge on the kind of experience these people have had. We stand a chance to lose a lot here shortly.

“So it’s really important for people to take care of things, not shoot near people’s houses or leave trash. And if you see people doing things like that? Turn them in.”