Along the northern rim of Jefferson County, just west of Montana City, Martinez Gulch Road winds gently through the South Hills, affording views of the peaks and valleys beyond. Lined with young ponderosas and dotted with attractive homes, it’s a peaceful spot.
Except when it’s not.
“Why is the county attorney sending an encroachment letter to Martinez Gulch Road homeowners?” resident Ken Vivrette asked at the May 13 meeting of the Jefferson County Commission. “Why all of a sudden the interest in a privately maintained road?”
The interest is part of a tangled tale that underscores growing area tensions between development and recreation. The county has been wrangling with property owners for three years over public access to the Eddye McClure East Trail, a popular five-mile hiking path from Martinez Gulch Road to Arrowroot Drive.
The McClure trail “has been there for a very long time, maybe 40 years,” says Mary Hollow, executive director of the Prickly Pear Land Trust, the non-profit organization that maintains the path. Like many others, she says, it was a user-created walkway that emerged over time.
But in 2021, Mike Dowling and his daughters bought the Martinez Gulch Road property that includes the trailhead, hoping to subdivide the parcel for development. The Dowlings agreed to an easement to ensure trail access, but required the path and trailhead be moved 200 yards south.
Problems ensued almost immediately. Trail users parked on both sides of Martinez Gulch Road, which should have been fine, given that there’s a 60-foot right of way along the roadway. But the trail easement agreement specifies that it “does not allow for parking of motor vehicles in the trail easement, in particular, at the [trailhead].” Neighbors say the hikers park on grassy areas, creating fire hazards, and the parked cars pose a danger on the 20-foot-wide road.
In 2022, nearby homeowners planted steel stakes on both sides of the road at the trailhead, preventing cars from parking there. The Dowling family erected a fence at the entrance to its property to ward off parking and, they said, the dumping of debris on their land.
County officials and the Prickly Pear Land Trust took issue with those steps. Though privately owned, Martinez Gulch Road is a public highway. That means anybody can drive it and park along its shoulders. (Martinez Gulch Road is maintained by an independent rural district, but the county’s position is that it is a public highway.)
Last month, County Attorney Steve Haddon sent letters to Dowling and Shelly Anderson, who owns the land opposite Dowling’s, threatening legal action if the stakes and fencing, described as “encroachments,” were not removed within four weeks.
“We had no prior notice that the county opposed the obstacles,” Lindsey Kamerzel, one of Dowling’s daughters, told The Monitor. Last fall, Martinez Gulch residents met county officials for what locals viewed as a productive meeting. Since then, says Kamerzel, “we’ve never heard a thing.”
At the May 13 meeting, Kamerzel said County Roads Supervisor Bear Taylor had told her father the county planned to construct a drainage ditch to ease water run-off, a persistent problem along Martinez Gulch. Kamerzel also said her family would take down the fence to accommodate the work and re-erect the barrier once the ditch was in place.
“When the trail was diverted and moved, we were very clear that we were not going to grant parking as part of the easement,” Kamerzel said later. “Parking is not possible where we’re at.”
The Commission plans to stand its ground. “The county obviously has to follow the law,” said Commissioner Cory Kirsch. “First we have to remove the encroachments. The easement is the easement: It’s a public right of way.”
Meeting attendees discussed creating a parking area where Martinez Gulch Road meets South Hills Road and installing “no parking” signs along the road above that. But the county and Prickly Pear Land Trust agreed on the difficulty of enforcing parking and traffic regulations along this isolated stretch of road.
“We don’t own the land,” said Prickly Pear’s Hollow. “And we don’t control the right of way.”
Seeking a resolution, Commissioner Craig Doolittle, who represents Montana City and the county’s northernmost residents, has been talking with Martinez Gulch Road residents and Prickly Pear since last week’s Commission meeting.
“I don’t have an answer yet,” he told The Monitor. “People are not going to stop living up there, people are not going to stop using the trail…We are going to have to work through it.”
