4 wheel spots (Belgrade, Shelby: live, horses, farmers)

[tinytimandkat]

Any place to go 4 wheel driving in the Shelby area?

[mattman3seven]

yes!

[Gman2007]

Most winters you need it just to get around on the hills in town!

[Reziac]

Just be careful about staying on existing roads and trails. Just one trip by a wheeled vehicle across the fragile prairie grass can do permanent damage.

That said.. I'd get some USGS maps and look for little dirt roads out in the boonies -- the hill roads can be pretty fun to drive, so I imagine they'd be fun on a 4-wheeler too.

[rickers]

Originally Posted by Reziac

Just one trip by a wheeled vehicle across the fragile prairie grass can do permanent damage.

Not nearly like plowing and planting !

Really not many folks around here really give a flying rats patootie. Folks do what they want and that's fine with most except the envirowhackos.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by rickers

Not nearly like plowing and planting !

Really not many folks around here really give a flying rats patootie. Folks do what they want and that's fine with most except the envirowhackos.

Most of the country attractive to 4-wheeling is pasture land, not cropland (tho try 4-wheeling, or snowmobiling for that matter, across someone's wheatfields and see how popular that makes you). Pasture can be fragile stuff, especially near-desert like so much of MT. If everyone treats it like a rat's patootie, pretty soon you don't have any grass to graze those cattle on. I've seen it happen.

Farmers and ranchers are the best conservationists around, because their livelihood depends on it. Know who beat it into my head that you don't track across the pasture in a truck? A cattle rancher in the Horseshoe Hills, north of Belgrade. Care to guess who did likewise for snowmobiles and winter wheat??