There is a ridge in Logan County, West Virginia, about 11 miles into the Tomblin Wildlife Management Area. The hunting up there is good. Getting up there is the problem.
Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida raised that problem publicly in August 2018, while serving as Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. His proposal was modest and it still made people nervous.
The People Who Paid For It
License buyers fund a large share of wildlife management in this country, through license sales and through federal excise taxes on guns, ammunition, and fishing tackle.
In the 2020 to 2021 fiscal year alone, West Virginia sold 809,509 hunting and fishing privileges for $14.3 million. Those buyers get older every year, the same as everyone else.
Buying Land Is the Easy Part
Over his tenure the agency added 85,896 acres of public hunting ground. That is a real number and it looks good in a report.
But acreage is not access. “We have a lot of beautiful Wildlife Management Areas where we’re spending millions of dollars to create great hunting,” McDaniel said. “But in a lot of cases, you can’t get to them.”
A hunter at 70 with a bad knee owns that land exactly as much as a hunter at 25 does. He just cannot use it.
Half a Mile
The proposal was a permitted ATV and UTV route, half a mile long, in one section of one county. Not a trail network. Not open access.
“It’s too steep to take a truck all the way to the top, but you can go right up with a four wheeler or UTV,” he said. And then, because he knew what people were about to assume: “In no way are we proposing letting ATV’s run through the WMA.”
He was right that they would assume it anyway.
Why Conservationists Fight Over Roads
The suspicion is earned. Access roads have a way of widening, and every user group that gets in eventually wants more. People who spend their lives protecting wild country learn to distrust the first half mile.
Stephen McDaniel is not an outsider to that instinct. He holds life memberships in Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and Quail Forever. He has hunted on two continents and in more than a dozen countries.
The question he was asking is one those organizations wrestle with too. Who is public land actually for, if a meaningful share of the public cannot physically get onto it?
An Aging Base
The average hunter in America is getting older. That is true in West Virginia and it is true everywhere, and it is the slow crisis underneath every state wildlife budget.
McDaniel framed the access question as safety and fairness. It is also arithmetic. An agency that makes it harder for a 70-year-old to hunt is shrinking its own funding base on purpose.
His proposal was permitted, limited, and specific. That is usually how these things have to start.
The Range That Stayed Closed
Access showed up in his tenure in another form. The Pedlar shooting range had been shut since roughly 2014, and by August 2019 McDaniel was still trying to reopen it.
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to get that done since last winter and it’s been a slow process,” he said. He brought in the National Rifle Association to run a safety evaluation.
His argument for it was economic before it was recreational. “When I go to a range I’ll stop and get gas and snacks, stop at a local shop or Walmart and pick up extra rounds and targets.”
The Version of This Nobody Argues About
Strip away the vehicles and the argument is simpler. Somebody paid into a license system their whole life, and the state used that money to improve ground they can no longer walk into.
“We’ve got to focus on getting better access for our hunters on public lands,” McDaniel said. That sentence is not controversial. Every method of acting on it is.
Stephen McDaniel left the agency in January 2022 and now runs a Christmas tree farm in Tucker County, where the terrain is not much gentler.
The ridge in Logan County is still there. So is everyone who cannot climb it.