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Using a helicopter to access landlocked parcels of public land is becoming more popular in places like Montana, much to the chagrin of folks without the inclination or money to utilize the method of transportation. Nevermind that folks wanting to access the locked up ground via traditional methods of transportation wouldn’t be able to anyway because it’s landlocked in many instances.
Nevertheless, Montana has passed SB 106 which places a 24-hour waiting period from time of travel to time of hunt and adds that helicopters must land within “100 feet of a two-track road.”
Needless to say, there will be folks both applauding and decrying SB 104, as there is with any new legislation, but my take is that Montana could have just made flying a chopper into landlocked public land illegal across the board, but they didn’t. Montana sided with public-land hunters and issued a commonsense law that upholds fair chase hunting standards.
That said, will I be chartering a chopper to access public-land elk or mulies anytime soon? Probably not, but it’s nice to know that I could if I wanted to.
As always, I’d love to get your take.
And I say no..we need this settle this issue about rich locking up those areas…
This sounds like a very expensive way to hunt, especially if you successfully harvest a large animal like an elk. I wonder how many helicopter flights would be required to transport 300 or 400 pounds of meat, trophy head, etc.
Hi Kevin, I watched a YouTube video about this subject. Four bow hunters split the helicopter costs, one bull was harvested then flown out whole.
This required two trips transporting hunters and gear in, one trip to remove the mature bull then two trips to fly hunters and gear out. I believe that video was filmed in 2019 (maybe?). The cost per hunter (I’m going on memory alone) for a 55 mile flight was about $450 plus an additional &250 to extract the elk. The total for that helicopter time (one hunt) was then approximately $1800 and $250 to retrieve an elk ($2050) plus tip. As fascinating as this may sound, I can do a tremendous amount of hunting on $2K! The only reason I would hunt in such a manner was to drive a point home to those who refuse to allow hunters to access public land. Recently I did get a long desired permission by “saving a duck from starvation.” That one kind act, a story in itself, opened the door to one truly amazing piece of public land.
Everyone stop for 3 seconds and ask “Public” ? How is any landlocked land public ? What “public” accesses it? Only “Public” that gets permission from “Private” !
As for heli hunting it’s a semi win. As for the opinion on using it, when I hunted in New Zealand it was common to use helicopters for access and retrieval.
This is a small win but the corner crossing issue needs resolved in all states. All public land should be accessible for everyone’s use.