Jim Klug, founder and CEO of Yellow Dog Flyfishing; journalist Hal Herring, host of the Carrying the Fire podcast; and Alex Leone, executive director of the Public Land/Water Access Association (PLWA), join Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds to explain how Montana’s 1985 Stream Access Law grew out of Article IX, Section 3 of the state’s 1972 Constitution and two Montana Supreme Court cases, Montana Coalition for Stream Access v. Curran (1984) and Galt v. State (1987), that affirmed the public’s right to recreate on any water capable of recreational use, regardless of who owns the streambed. They discuss the law’s outdoor-economy impact, PLWA’s ongoing work defending it against newer, narrower challenges, and its connection to other current access fights, including corner-crossing litigation and last year’s failed push by Senator Mike Lee to sell off federal public land. The conversation closes on the Montana Stream Access Rally, a free public event on September 17, 2026, at Bozeman’s Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture, organized to show state lawmakers that stream access remains a politically untouchable issue ahead of the next legislative session.

Can a shared public trust in land and water survive in a country with growing wealth concentration?

Jim Klug founded Yellow Dog Flyfishing in Bozeman 27 years ago and has spent his career sending anglers to rivers around the world. Hal Herring, a longtime conservation journalist and The Wild Idea’s first-ever guest, now hosts the Carrying the Fire podcast after years fronting Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ show. Alex Leone leads the Public Land/Water Access Association (PLWA), the Bozeman-based nonprofit that has defended Montana’s public access to rivers and streams since 1985. The three join Bill and Anders to unpack what is often called the gold standard of stream access law in the American West, and why, forty years after it passed, the fight to keep it is still active.

Herring traces the law’s roots to Montana’s 1972 Constitution, which declared the state’s waters “the property of the state for the use of the people,” and to a string of landowner disputes that tested what that meant in practice, including a 1985 legislative fix and two Montana Supreme Court rulings, Montana Coalition for Stream Access v. Curran (1984) and Galt v. State (1987), that upheld the public’s right to wade, float, and fish up to the ordinary high-water mark on any water capable of recreational use, regardless of who owns the land beneath it. Klug lays out what that guarantee means economically, pointing to the guides, outfitters, fly shops, and tourism businesses the law supports, and contrasts it with neighboring states like Wyoming and Colorado, where landowners can own the streambed itself and drifting anglers can be cited for trespassing if their boat brushes a rock. Leone describes PLWA’s day-to-day work fielding 60 to 80 access complaints a year, about ten percent of them stream-related, and connects the law’s durability to a wider pattern: sportsmen’s clubs and grassroots groups showing up, generation after generation, whenever the law is challenged.

The conversation turns to why the fight never fully ends. Leone notes that the era of big, well-funded legal challenges to the law’s core has largely passed, but says newer, more incremental pressures, like heavier river surveillance, keep surfacing. Anders draws a line from stream access to last year’s fight over Senator Mike Lee’s proposed sale of federal public land and to the ongoing corner-crossing litigation PLWA is pursuing alongside Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, framing all of it as the same underlying question: whether a shared public trust in land and water can survive in a country with growing wealth concentration. Herring, invoking the late conservationist Jim Posewitz, argues that access has to come before protection, since people rarely fight for landscapes they’ve never been allowed to experience. The episode closes on the Montana Stream Access Rally, a September 17 gathering in Bozeman that Klug helped organize, meant less as protest than as a visible reminder to lawmakers, ahead of the next legislative session, that Montanans of every political stripe are still watching.

In this episode:

• The 1972 Montana Constitution’s “dynamite box” Hal Herring traces the law’s roots to a clause declaring the state’s waters “the property of the state for the use of the people,” and to the early landowner disputes, including Lowell Hildreth’s fencing of the Beaverhead River, that first tested what that meant.
• The 1985 Stream Access Law and the court cases that upheld it How Montana Coalition for Stream Access v. Curran (1984) and Galt v. State (1987) affirmed the public’s right to recreate up to the ordinary high-water mark on any water capable of recreational use, regardless of streambed ownership.
• The 2009 legislative fix Removing streambeds from the property tax base in 2009, a move Herring credits with turning many landowners who had opposed the law in favor of it.
• The economics of access Jim Klug on how stream access underwrites guides, outfitters, fly shops, and tourism businesses across Montana, and how the state’s laws compare to Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, where streambeds can be privately owned.
• What PLWA actually does Alex Leone on fielding 60 to 80 public access complaints a year, working with landowners as often as against them, and why the organization’s mission depends on their cooperation.
• Corner crossing and the bigger access picture How the same public trust question underlying stream access also runs through the corner-crossing fight PLWA is pursuing with Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, and last year’s failed push by Senator Mike Lee to sell off federal public land.
• “Access is first” Herring, citing the late conservationist Jim Posewitz, argues that people can’t be expected to fight for landscapes they’ve never been allowed to experience.
• The Montana Stream Access Rally A free public event on September 17, 2026, in Bozeman, meant to show state lawmakers that Montanans across the political spectrum are paying attention ahead of the next legislative session.

Links & Resources

Organizations & Initiatives:

• Public Land/Water Access Association (PLWA) — Bozeman-based nonprofit, founded in 1985, that defends public access to Montana’s public lands and waters, including through its Access Advocates program. 
• Montana Stream Access Rally — Free public event on September 17, 2026, at Bozeman’s Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture, organized to show lawmakers that Montanans support the state’s stream access law ahead of the next legislative session. 
• Carrying the Fire Podcast — Hal Herring’s independent podcast on conservation, land, and reconnecting with nature. 

Government & Policy:

• Montana Stream Access Law (1985) — State law (MCA 23-2-301 et seq.) guaranteeing public recreational use of Montana’s rivers and streams up to the ordinary high-water mark, regardless of who owns the underlying land. 
• Montana Constitution, Article IX, Section 3 (1972) — Constitutional provision declaring the state’s waters “the property of the state for the use of its people,” the legal foundation for the Stream Access Law. 
• Montana Coalition for Stream Access v. Curran (1984) — Montana Supreme Court case affirming the public’s right to use the Dearborn River for recreation regardless of the landowner’s objections, discussed in the episode as one of the law’s founding test cases. 
• Galt v. State (1987) — Montana Supreme Court case rejecting a landowner’s challenge to the Stream Access Law as an unconstitutional taking, while narrowing the law to bar structures like duck blinds below the high-water mark. 

People Mentioned:

• Jim Posewitz — Montana conservationist, longtime state wildlife biologist, and author of Beyond Fair Chase, whose “access is first” philosophy Hal Herring cites in the episode.
• James H. Goetz — Bozeman attorney who represented the Montana Coalition for Stream Access in the Curran and Hildreth cases.
• Tracy Stone-Manning — Former BLM director and past guest referenced as the source of the “repeat offender” nickname for returning guests. Catch our conversations with Tracy in Episode 14 and Episode 62.

Alex Leone grew up in a newspaper family, migrating from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Billings, Montana, and beyond. He developed an appreciation for water and the wild places along its edges as a youth and spent much time trekking through the creeks of the Black Hills and Beartooth Plateau in search of trout and solitude.

Alex completed his undergraduate degree in Forestry at the University of Montana and after starting his career with the Forest Service, worked in the outdoor recreation industry for several years. He attended graduate school at Montana State University, earning an M.S. degree in Earth Sciences with research focused on the impacts of drought in the Jefferson River Basin. After graduate school, Alex was employed by Clark Fork Coalition for 8 years working on a variety of Superfund advocacy projects, policy issues, and applied science in the Clark Fork River basin.

Presently, he resides in Anaconda, MT, and serves on several local boards including the George Grant Chapter of Trout Unlimited. He is a self-professed weather and climate fanatic, atmospheric enthusiast, and Montana geography aficionado. An avid and lifelong fisherman, hiker, and public lands user, Alex is proud to lead an organization that works to ensure that future generations have equitable access to public lands and waters that have shaped the lives of many that love Montana.

Jim Klug is the founder and CEO of Yellow Dog Flyfishing, an award-winning author, photographer, filmmaker, and host of the Waypoints podcast. A lifelong angler who has fished in more than 60 countries, Jim has spent over 40 years exploring the world’s great fisheries while helping build Yellow Dog into one of the most respected names in flyfishing travel. His work has earned him the American Museum of Fly Fishing’s Izaak Walton Award and AFFTA’s Lefty Kreh Industry Leadership Award.

Learn more about Jim and his work:

• WAYPOINTS Podcast
• Klug Photos
• Big Sky Journal – Interview and Article
• American Museum of Fly Fishing – Isaak Walton Award
• In The Loop Magazine – Profile on Jim Klug – Part 1
• In The Loop Magazine – Profile on Jim Klug – Part 2
• Global Rescue – Bolivia Evacuation Story – Klug
• Fly Dreamers – Interview

Hal Herring is a conservation and environment writer of 28 years, the author of a book on historical firearms and old west history, and a longtime contributing editor at Field and Stream. He is completing a book on the American Public Lands, he’s hosted the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast for 7 years and 200 episodes, and he has spent 26 years as a forestry contractor/subcontractor on public lands.

Listen to our previous conversation with Hal in Episode 2: Tailgate Conservation.

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