Great Falls Tribune
Editorial - Oct 9, 2004

Invisible monument

A couple of weeks ago we greeted the creation of what we thought was a good map of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.

On this issue, we should have known better. We won't bore you with how it happened, but suffice it to say none of the maps e-mailed to us by the office of U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg was the actual new monument map.

The good map--showing land ownership and the boundary--turned out to be the old one, the one the Rehberg-Interior Department "compromise" replaces.

We finally got the new map from BLM, and that map does not show the monument's boundary.

So here we have it: a classic of politico-bureaucratic foolishness, a monument map that doesn't show the monument!

In a way, it doesn't matter. The public land encompassed by the monument boundary has its own color and still is easily identifiable.

What is bad about it is that the private land on the outside edges of the monument but still encompassed by the boundary are no longer identifiable.

That's silly and serves no public purpose that we can identify except to confuse the issue and, in a de facto way, to downsize the designated monument.

Meanwhile, if you're headed toward the Breaks anytime soon, we'd recommend getting your hands on one of the old maps.

Note: Download the BLM's original Monument map here (Adobe Acrobat file).