Recreational Land on the Smith River, Meagher County

The only river in Montana where floating requires a permit

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks administers the Smith River, from the Camp Baker put-in to the Eden Bridge take-out, as the state's only river corridor requiring a permit for all recreational floating. Demand is genuinely extreme: more than 20,000 people apply each year for roughly 1,200 available permits, each covering a party of up to 15 people for a multi-day float. The nonresident lottery-application fee was increased by the 2025 Montana Legislature, and the online lottery application window typically opens in early February and closes around mid-February -- both details worth confirming directly with FWP each year, since permit terms and fees here have changed recently and can change again.

For a buyer, the practical upshot is that river access on this stretch is scarce and tightly rationed for everyone, including people who don't own land here -- which is part of why river-corridor property in Meagher County commands the kind of premium the hub's ranching-and-recreation framing only gestures at. But scarcity of public floating permits is a different thing from unrestricted private access, and owning land along the corridor comes with its own specific rules, not blanket river rights.

Owning riverside land doesn't mean owning river access for everyone else -- or full privacy from floaters

Of the roughly 118 miles of shoreline along the permitted Smith River corridor, only about 26 miles are public land; the rest -- including the majority of the immediate riverbank -- is private. Floaters using the corridor are expected to respect private property along the way (including not trespassing onto private land to gather firewood), so private riverside land generally stays private in the way you'd expect. But the corridor's approximately 27 boat camps and 52 designated campsites sit on a mix of National Forest, FWP, DNRC state, and leased private land -- FWP specifically leases boat-camp sites from private landowners at named locations including Staigmiller, the Upper, Middle, and Lower Ridgetop camps, the Upper and Lower Givens Gulch camps, and the Upper and Lower Rattlesnake camps. If a parcel you're evaluating is one of these leased sites (or borders one), that's a real, specific lease relationship with the state, not a generic 'river frontage' amenity -- ask FWP and the seller directly whether any boat-camp lease is attached to the property and what its terms and renewal timeline look like.

If you own land on the permitted stretch: a narrow floating exemption, not a blanket right

Landowners along the permitted section of the Smith River do get one specific carve-out from the general permit system: a landowner may conduct a one-day float without a permit, but only for the purpose of performing maintenance on their own contiguous fee-title property adjacent to the river. That exemption comes with real limits -- it's day-use only, consecutive 'back-to-back' landowner floats are prohibited, and if a landowner wants to do a multi-day, overnight float (the kind most Smith River trips actually are), they need to secure a private float-trip permit through the same system everyone else uses, not an automatic landowner pass.

This is a detail worth getting right before you buy specifically for river access: owning land on the Smith River corridor gives you a real, but narrow, maintenance-float privilege on your own property -- it does not give you or your guests an unlimited private right to float the river whenever you like without a permit. If recreational floating access is a meaningful part of why you're buying a specific parcel, plan around the same lottery odds as everyone else for anything beyond a same-day maintenance trip on your own land.

What this means before you buy

Confirm three things directly with FWP's Smith River State Park office before valuing a parcel on its river-corridor location: whether the property falls within the permitted Camp Baker-to-Eden Bridge stretch at all (river-adjacent land elsewhere in Meagher County is not part of this system), whether any FWP boat-camp lease is already attached to the property, and the current lottery rules, fees, and landowner-exemption terms, since all three have been subject to recent legislative and administrative changes. Don't assume river frontage in Meagher County functions like river frontage on an unregulated Montana stream -- the Smith River's permit system is one of the most tightly managed access regimes in the state, and it shapes what a riverside owner can actually do almost as much as the deed does.