Wildlife and bowhunters alike scored a win when volunteers young and old rolled up their sleeves in the Flathead Valley near Kalispell to clean up a 52-acre property owned by the Montana Bowhunters Education Foundation (MBEF). Nineteen volunteers from RMEF’s Flathead Valley and Five Valleys chapters, MBEF and Flathead Valley Archers (FVA) gathered in the shadow of the Swan Range over a weekend to help make navigating the property easier by clearing out deadfall, removing dilapidated barbed wire fencing and treating invasive weeds.
“Some parts were so overgrown that deer and elk couldn’t even manage to walk through it,” says Sarah Yerkes, RMEF Flathead Valley chapter chair who serves as president for both MBEF and FVA.
MBEF was founded in 2011 to preserve and promote bowhunting’s heritage while providing a space for bowhunters, families and the local 4-H group to practice archery. The property is also the setting for two annual 3D archery shoots hosted by FVA. Too, MBEF holds a drawing for two youth—one boy and one girl—to hunt big game on the parcel each year.
“We’ve had multiple kids out there that have gotten whitetail bucks and does,” Yerkes says. She hopes the habitat improvements will draw more big game to the property, adding, “maybe one day someone will get an elk.”
During the work weekend volunteers sawed and gathered up fallen trees, branches and brush, and cut down and removed several hazardous tree limbs that were located along the property’s archery course and near elevated blinds. Local businesses donated the use of an excavator and dump truck, which eased the heavy lifting. The group also rolled up one mile of loose barbed wire gathered from dilapidated fencing in two locations—one running along a roadway and another along a boundary with neighboring state lands—and hand-pulled or backpack-sprayed Canada thistle infestations on other areas of the property. Aside from elk and deer, the work also benefits black bears, wild turkeys and upland game birds.
Yerkes says the effort wasn’t the first time volunteers have put in a day’s—or weekend’s—work on the MBEF property, and it won’t be the last. “We still have a lot of work to do,” she says. “I have the same group of volunteers that are like my ride or die, and don’t think I could probably thank them enough for what they give.”
MBEF’s long-term goal is to raise enough funds through specialty license plate sales to build a new facility on the property, which will house a small bowhunting museum, a dedicated space for bowhunter education classes and a public indoor archery range—a commodity which isn’t currently available in the Flathead Valley.