Sun River Game Preserve

[MTGomer]

Certainly somebody here knows...
When looking at the hunting regulations, there is a big Green area on the map in R4 up the Sun River from Gibson called the Sun River Game Preserve, which appears to be hard to access and possibly roadless, and it is denoted as 'no hunting' .

This is a huge area, and from what I can tell, is entirely different from the Sun River Wildlife Management Area, well known for shed hunting, which is further south and on the east slope of the front.

Anybody know what the deal is with this area, why its off-limits etc..?

 

[El Jason]

The formatting on this article is weird, but gives you some historical perspective on the Preserve. It was created by the legislature many years ago, but at
s this article (dated, but still applicable) points out, the Preserve really takes away from the wilderness flavor of elk hunting in the Sun River drainage.

http://archive.org/stream/montanaoutdoors441969mont/montanaoutdoors441969mont_djvu.txt

 

[Ben Lamb]

The Sun River Game Preserve is one of Montana's last game preserves. Back in the early 1900's, the state set aside certain areas that were to be used as wildlife factories and the SRGP was born. This was in a time when the wildlife populations across the board had been depleted with unregulated hunting and/or market hunting. This preserve was created in 1913 and serves as calving and summer range for the Sun River herd.

Posewitz had a good opinion piece on it's 100 year anniversary: http://missoulian.com/news/opinion/...cle_3e0a46a8-4dff-11e3-b710-0019bb2963f4.html

 

[whiskeydog]

"In 1913, Montana established the Sun River Game Preserve, the first of several set up during the next decade to provide places where elk were safe from hunters and could graze on forage without competition from livestock."

http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/HTML/articles/2007/ElkManagement.htm

 

[LCH]

I spent several days backpacking in there a couple years ago. Beautiful country, but I saw no elk and very few deer.

 

[----]

A very crappy screenshot of a pdf Nameless Range sent me a while back of the 1947 big game regulations.

You can see that even then there were still a lot of these preserves scattered around the state. I know the one in the burnt fork drainage of the Bitterroot was around for a while after these regulations. I'd love to hear it Tjones or Shoots-straight know more about the one in the South part of the valley.