COLUMN ONE : Siege of the City Slickers : In Montana, ranchers and environmentalists have found a common enemy--urban refugees buying ‘ranchettes,’ threatening the very tranquillity they seek.

Under big cold-blue mountain skies, Montana kindles powerful dreams, anxious fears.

The dream is of the good life.

The fear is of killing the dream.

Like Florida before it, Montana is tempting the getaway yearnings of restless Americans, that indomitable instinct to wander in search of better, more, nicer. Instead of a beach house and a deep-water tan, it’s a 20-acre ranchette and spicy fresh air that Montana promises the frazzled urbanite. Along with a cord of firewood, maybe a horse, old-fashioned values and, yes, lunker trout as big as your forearm.

A land boom is under way here--a quest for a stake in nature’s fantasy.

But do not expect a red carpet welcome.

Even old and angry enemies here are joining together in sounding the alarm, contending that ranchette subdivisions are eroding the foundation of Montana’s allure--the open space, the leathery character, and the wild high-mountain dramas of nature.

Environmentalists, asked who spoils the great public lands of the Rockies, used to say it was people such as ranchers, with their smelly ubiquitous herds of cows trampling the life out of streams and overgrazing the delicate meadows.

Cattlemen, asked who threatens their venerated way of life, used to say simply the environmentalists, with their sanctimonious demands that public lands be managed more like parks than feed lots.

But now the warring groups stand uncomfortably closer together and shake their heads sadly, knowingly. There is discontent down there in the cities, baby boomers are going to more funerals than weddings and questioning anew the meaning of life. And, hell’s bells who would have guessed Montana would spring forth as some sort of land of redemption? Some sort of danged fad?

Thirty years ago, timber men Wayne Joyner and his father were wondering what to do with land they owned covered by tree stumps.

“I remember my dad and another fellow were talking. The fellow said, why not sell it in smaller chunks and finance it? My dad wondered, what in the world would people want with that? And the fellow said I think people would pay a little something for a piece of the outdoors.”

Joyner, now based in Bozeman, Mont., stopped counting a decade ago after he sold more than 300,000 acres of ranchettes. “More volume, more acres than anyone in the United States,” he proclaims, proudly.

And this may be only a start. Sales are really booming these days. Because of loose regulations and Old West traditions, Montana officials say they do not have reliable statistics on subdivision growth. But one indication is that while population growth overall in the state is flat, in prime Rocky Mountain ranchette counties there have been double-digit increases.

Maybe it was celebrities such as Ted Turner and Mel Gibson and Brooke Shields who fueled the fad by buying ranches and demonstrating Montana’s appeal as an escape. And maybe writers such as Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford helped with their evocative descriptions of Montana as inspiration. Add to that some cowboy cachet, free ranging elk and antelope, fishing and hunting and skiing, and prices as low as 20 acres for less than $10,000. . . .

This land offers all the beauty of undisturbed wilderness with the added advantage of good access roads.

The kitchen-table dreamer in West Hollywood or Baltimore or Detroit may not catch the contradiction in the four-color land sale brochure. But Montanans do: Undisturbed wilderness and roads both?

As they stare at the promotional flyers, many locals wonder how they came to such a pass. Inevitably, they are drawn to the role of that Montana institution, the rancher. It is the ranchers, after all, who are selling out one by one to make way for the ranchettes.

And the ranchers say the changing face of the state is rooted in one of the oldest, liveliest and most pervasive environmental arguments in the West: grazing rights.

During the winter, sheep and cattle in Montana stay on the privately owned pastures of the ranchers, but in the summer many ranchers are dependent on access to federal lands at higher elevations, where they can turn their stock loose to graze at a taxpayer-subsidized fee of less than $2 per animal per month.

Pushed by environmentalists who argue the animals are ruining public lands, the federal government has been moving to restrict that access.

The House voted last week to raise the grazing fee to at least $8.70 in 1995. Under the proposal, the fees would eventually rise to the “fair market value” paid by ranchers who do not have access to public lands.

And earlier this year, the U.S. Forest Service proposed a sudden 44% curtailment of cattle grazing on its lands in the upper Ruby Valley, about 50 miles northwest of Yellowstone National Park, to allow the trout streams and pine-scented meadows to heal.

Without government permits to graze on public land in the summer, ranchers say that some, maybe many, would be driven out of business and left to sell out their private, winter pastures. Typically, the buyers would be subdividers, and their enticements are plenty. Land worth $1,000 an acre for ranching can fetch 50% to 1,000% more when divided into small parcels, according to federal land officials.

The cattlemen and sheep ranchers now happily argue that a herd of livestock may beat down a hillside, but nothing like a herd of real estate developers. And significant evidence and some environmentalist backing now support them in this contention.

“If the choice is ranchettes or cattle, I’d go with the cattle,” says Don Bachman, of the regional environmentalist group known as The Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Private ranchlands make up an important part of the Western habitat for wildlife. Whether one flies over the countryside in a bush plane or drives hundreds of miles on its two-lane roads, it is easy enough to see for yourself: Elk, deer and antelope by the hundreds are feeding in private pastureland through winter and into spring. Some of these animals are at modern population highs in Montana.

“If the pressure grows too much, ranchers are going to have to sell. And that will put a lot more pressure on wildlife in Montana. When people buy a ranch they turn it into lots from two acres to 20 acres, then they put two horses on it and a couple of dogs. That kind of subdivision is incompatible with the winter range needs of wildlife,” says Bob Birrer, who has ranched in the valley for 50 years.

Just over the ridgeline on the other side of the Gravelly Mountains from the Ruby Valley is the famous and breathtaking Madison Valley, leading into Yellowstone Park. The farmers in the Ruby Valley point to the Madison as evidence of what happens when subdividers move in.

According to a U.S. Forest Service survey, 20% of the private land in the Madison Valley is now subdivided into dream ranchettes, reducing significantly the open winter range for 7,000 elk, 3,000 antelope and assorted goats, moose and bighorn sheep.

“I went through the county tax records and there sure are a lot of addresses in California,” district Ranger Mark A. Petroni tells a community gathering. He darkens the meeting room in a Butte hotel and shows photographic slides of ranchette sprawl as it chews away at the openness. In the shadows in the back of the room, cowboy hats and ball caps nod with understanding.

All kinds of publications appealing to the outdoor-minded promote Montana land subdivisions. Even the strongly environmentalist magazine Backpacker carries advertisements promoting 20-acre parcels.

Petroni understands the appeal. “What’s happening is natural. A lot of baby boomers are getting to think about retirement and they’re looking for more elbow room.”

As they move into the Rockies, however, these urban expatriates unwittingly squeeze out what they came to enjoy. “These people usually have a couple of horses, an ATV (all-terrain vehicle) and I must say they have a fairly significant impact on the ground,” he says.

Petroni is among those who believe that given the development pressures on the high country here, grazing is relatively more benign than urban environmentalists care to admit. Cheap federal grazing rights will not necessarily hold cattlemen back from selling to developers, “but at least it gives them options,” Petroni says. “There is a direct correlation between public lands grazing and the preservation of open space.”

The first day we were on the property taking pictures we flushed up an American Bald Eagle. What a sight that was.

“I hope they enjoyed it,” says Lance Olsen. He is reading the testimonial in a land brochure. “What they fail to understand is when they start building and their neighbors start building, there will be no more eagles.”

Olsen runs the Great Bear Foundation of Montana, dedicated to preventing extinction of the grizzly, which roams remote mountain regions here in uneasy rhythm with the coming 21st Century.

“Everyone says, oh my little piece of the wild isn’t going to affect the grizzly bears. The bears can go somewhere else. But they don’t want to accept that someone else has moved into somewhere else . . . And each of them is taking food out of the bear’s mouth,” says Olsen.

The bear foundation is now experimenting with giving ranchers cash reimbursement for stock killed by bears, one of several unusual grass-roots campaigns under way in Montana to ease the pressure on ranchers and preserve open space.

Another such campaign is the Helena-based Montana Land Reliance. This organization seeks out anti-development landowners and explains the tax and environmental benefits of encumbering their property with perpetual conservation easements. These deed restrictions are designed to forever prevent use of the property “inconsistent” with conservation.

The reliance now calls itself the largest local land trust in the United States with 77,000 acres, much of it in prime position along rivers, now locked up. “The essence of Montana is that it’s undeveloped,” explains the group’s Bill Long.

More straightforward are the efforts of Vital Ground. Started by wildlife trainer Doug Seus, whose huge Kodiak grizzly Bart was the star of “The Bear,” Vital Ground is dedicated to direct purchases of land that is of particular importance to survival of bears and wolves. So far, the organization has made one purchase of rangeland for the last Montana grizzlies to roam into the plains. Vital Ground is raising money for a second purchase.

Their efforts are spurred by the results of ranchette subdivisions in Western Montana.

The famous Flathead Valley below Glacier National Park is often choked with traffic in the summer thanks to the mix of city and ranchette growth and tourists. Environmentalists complain of water quality problems encroaching on Flathead Lake, the largest body of fresh water in the contiguous Western states.

Some ranchettes have become eyesores, the result of sloppy trailer-park construction and overgrazing by recreational horses.

Local newspapers casually report grizzlies that are harassed, collared, re-located and sometimes shot when civilization encroaches on their shrinking domain.

” . . . in the Lawrences’ yard . . . I took pictures of this bear for nearly 45 minutes at a distance of less than 50 yards. (I was in my pickup.) The bear completely ignored whistling, yelling and even the horn blowing that I did in an attempt to get him--or her--to raise his head . . . For sure, this bear, although not aggressive, is not afraid of humans and is headed for trouble. I just hope he doesn’t hurt someone in the process,” wrote a columnist for the Hungry Horse News recently.

Ranchers, although happy to sound the alarm over encroaching ranchettes, have fought efforts to restrict subdivisions in Montana, and thus far successfully.

“This is the Old West,” says Bill Chaloupka, associate professor of political science at the University of Montana. “The I-can-use-my-land-as-I-see-fit is a very powerful impulse here.”

Presently, the law allows ranches to be cut into parcels as small as 20 acres without any community review. The 20-acre units can then be carved into smaller plots on what the law specifies as occasional basis or whenever a family wants to divide property among its members. Opponents say this amounts to no subdivision control whatsoever.

“Everybody knows there is a problem. There is no debate about that. You can see it in just the number of real estate signs that are up, even in the most pristine areas,” says state Rep. Dave Wanzenried, a Kalispell Democrat and leader in the fight for more government regulation of subdivisions. “But for every acre subdivided under government review, three take place without review.”

County land records show the sketchy outlines of the trend. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition surveyed counties in the vicinity of the national park. In one, Carbon County, more than one-third of the private land has been subdivided. In others, the total was less.

The lack of oversight also may have allowed the Montana equivalent of Florida swampland to be sold in the land rush.

The CBS news show “60 Minutes” aired a disturbing segment this spring in which one Northeastern land company was accused of old-fashioned land scam practices in Montana, among other things--pushing buyers to rush a deal and not leveling with them about the details of the property.

In one case, CBS said the company used brochures “full of beautiful pictures of national parks” that were “nowhere near the land they’re selling.” CBS showed an actual picture of the ranchette development, which had been devastated by fire in the mid-1980s.

But there are also plenty of satisfied buyers. In Belvidere, N.J., Irene Poykala and her husband, Don, bought their Montana ranchette sight unseen from a different company, and have planned their entire retirement around their property.

“We’re 50 years old, and we like the mountains. We go to Upstate New York but we decided when we’re ready in five years we really, really wanted the mountains,” she says. “We just don’t want to be city people anymore.”

Recently, they traveled to Montana to behold their future and plan their new home. “We were so absolutely astounded. It was even better than they said. We like scenery and they didn’t tell us it was this good.”

And what about ranchette development disrupting the very tranquillity they dream of?

“It takes a special kind of person to want that life. We’re not worried about that.”

Indeed, many Montanans think their weather, if nothing else, will ultimately scare off all but the heartiest urban refugees.

“There is nothing that keeps the population of Montana under control like Willard Scott getting up and saying the coldest spot in American is Drummond, Mont., where it is 55-below with a windchill of minus-73,” says Jim Gransbery, agricultural and political reporter for the Billings Gazette.

Independence and the freedom to move about are more than myths casually voiced in this state, so it would be decidedly un-Montanan for people here, especially ranchers, to try to stifle growth. Yet there is an irony in the land boom that is inescapable.

Even established land sellers such as Wayne Joyner of Rocky Mountain Timberlands acknowledge that the reality of ranchettes is a stark contrast to the myth that makes them so appealing to buyers in the cities. Joyner says he wants to sell only the myth.

“The average person buying a 20-acre parcel visits that parcel two to three days every two to three years,” he says.

So what are people buying?

“It’s a dream. I’ve got a million letters from the guy who says, my car was overheating on the freeway and I was in a traffic jam, and then I thought about my property up there and I felt better.

“I’ve sold property for 20 years to people who have never seen it.” Joyner says.

Which is fine with him.

If buyers really followed through with development “it would defeat our whole purpose,” Joyner explains. “If all those people started moving up here, I wouldn’t do this. I think more of Montana than that.”

Yet the movement is happening. Why just this year, cattlemen had to fight in the Montana Legislature to preserve one of the founding prerogatives of the West, the open range law.

Lawmakers representing areas of tourism and subdivisions said it was high time to start fencing cows in. The open range law puts the burden the other way around, saying that cows can roam except where they are fenced out.

“People come up here with a dream about Montana,” says Kim Enkerud, resources coordinator for the Montana Stockgrowers. “But then they want to change the laws and make it like the place they left.”

Researcher Doug Conner in Seattle contributed to this story.