Help keep the Front the way it is now! Increasingly, important habitat along the Rocky Mountain Front is under pressure from the subdivision of private land for residential development. Conservation easements have proven to be a valuable tool for protecting wildlife and a traditional way of life by leaving land in private ownership. However, in order to capitalize on the gains already made, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is in need of renewed funding to purchase additional conservation easements in the coming years. Learn how you can help this important program>>
Travel Plan for the Rocky Mountain Front Released!
The Coalition applauded the Forest Service for its plan that protects wildlife while emphasizing traditional uses on the Front. On October 1st, the Lewis and Clark released a final Travel Plan for the lower two-thirds of the Rocky Mountain Front covering roughly 390,000 acres, excluding the Badger-Two Medicine area. The Plan will guide all travel, recreation, and other uses on the Front for the next two decades, specifying routes for hikers and horseback riders, snowmobiles and off-road vehicles (ORVs) ...more>

On the Front > Biodiversity

Grizzly Bear

The Rocky Mountain Front represents a biological treasure of unparalleled diversity, from charismatic megafauna, such grizzly bear and bighorn sheep, to Arctic grayling and other disappearing native Montana fish, to rare flowering plants, such as the corralroot orchid and several variety of primrose, to the northern bog lemming. Biologists have recorded more than 700 plant species, as well as 290 species of wildlife on the Front: 72 mammals; 190 birds; seven reptiles; eight amphibians; and 13 fish. It’s not simply the Front’s biodiversity that is celebrated, but the integrity of the underlying ecosystems.

Rocky Mountain Elk

Big game: Hunters treasure the Front as a place to stalk no less than 10 big game species, including seven prized ungulates: mule deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, pronghorn antelope and white-tail deer. The Front is home to the nation’s most significant concentrations of elk outside Yellowstone and the largest herd of bighorn sheep, pegged at 600 to 700 head.


Cutthroat Trout

Native fish: Of the 13 fish species found on the Front, many are represented in remnant populations of vanishing native species, such as the once plentiful cutthroat trout and the ever-rare minnow hybrid, the redbelly/fine-scale dace, found in Pine Butte Swamp Preserve. The Front has not historically been a hotbed of piscine diversity, but it does offer promise as the last best place to recover signature Montana natives, such as Arctic grayling, westslope cutthroat and threatened bull trout east of the Continental Divide.

Red-tailed Hawk

Birds: Among the 190 bird species found on the Front, there are at least 21 species of raptors, including nine species of owl and some of the densest concentrations of golden eagles. Fourteen species of duck and six species of grebe are known to breed here. Sandhill cranes, “a living fossil,” migrate along the Front with small numbers staying to breed. Other uncommon birds include trumpeter swans, curlews, white-faced ibis and white-tailed ptarmigan.

Lupine, yarrow, wild geranium, and prairie sunflowers

Flora: In 1996, The Nature Conservancy set out to document the rich array of plant life on the Front. Botanists David Hanna and Peter Lesica studied a narrow area bounded by the conservancy’s Pine Butte Swamp Preserve on the east to the 8,580-foot summit of Ear Mountain on the west—comprising a swath of land known in science as a transept. The botanists recorded a staggering 682 plant species from 71 families – one-third of all plants found in Montana. This plant diversity reflects the collision of landscapes found on the Front. This transition zone sandwiched between mountains and plains features alpine highlands, limber pine and Douglas fir forests, grasslands and a unique groundwater-fed wetland habitat, known as a fen, at Pine Butte Swamp.