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>

Issues > Threat: Energy Development

Shell natural gas plant on Canadian Rocky Mtn Front near Waterton N.P, Alberta

Public lands along Rocky Mountain Front are covered in old energy leases, many of them issued under dubious legality in the 1970s and early 1980s. There has been no production from any Front lease since the early 1990s when a drilling firm went belly up and walked away from its wells without meeting its clean-up and tax obligations. The most troubling hot spot in recent years has been in Blindhorse Outstanding Natural Area in the Front’s Blackleaf Unit west of Choteau, where the Canadian firm Startech has pursued plans to drill three wildcat wells. The Interior Department, BLM’s parent agency, indefinitely postponed the drilling application in October 2004, citing habitat concerns raised by hunters. “This could be an area that we don’t want to see developed,” said Rebecca Watson, assistant Interior secretary of lands and minerals. Conflicts over energy drilling are far from over, particularly in the Badger-Two Medicine where 47 leases blanket 106,000 acres of Forest Service land. But there is cause for hope.

In 2006, concerned Montanans began working out agreements with major leaseholders that would retire thousands of acres of leases through donations and use of private financing. The success of these agreements would require Congress to pass legislation, already introduced by Montana’s delegation, to keep retired leases from being re-sold at a later date. Lease retirement would spare taxpayers the costs of analyzing the impacts of natural gas exploration, as well as hidden costs to the local economy. Retiring these old leases will also help the Montana energy industry to focus on the northern and eastern parts of the state, where proven energy reserves are being developed without controversy.

The Front’s most viable drilling proposal remains the one advanced by Louisiana investor Sidney Longwell, who hopes to tap a federal lease in Hall Creek just outside Glacier National Park in the Badger-Two Medicine. Longwell’s 20-year battle to drill is currently being held up by a Forest Service study of its impacts on a proposed Traditional Cultural District for the Badger-Two Medicine.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), meanwhile, is considering a proposal to retrofit Gibson Dam west of Augusta just inside the national forest to produce hydroelectric power. The proposal by Greenfields Irrigation District and its partner in Washington state would not alter the stream flow regimen of the Sun River coming out of Gibson Reservoir, but it does raise concerns about placement of power lines near or through a wildlife management area and industrialization of agricultural lands.