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 > Preserving public lands: the new economic driver in Montana

Many of the West’s more prosperous communities are located near protected natural landscapes. Ongoing studies suggest that towns like Choteau and Augusta, traditional ranching communities located just east of the Front, stand to gain far more if their scenic backyard is protected and spared industrial activity. Reliable estimates indicate the amount of gas under the Front would power the nation’s needs for no more than a week.

Some claim that tax and mineral-estate royalties could bring huge revenue to Teton County. But under new Montana taxation laws, a likely scenario would hardly generate enough revenue to cover even 1 percent of Teton County’s annual budget. Revenue from energy development may not even cover the increased road maintenance, weed abatement, law enforcement and other costs that accompany drilling.

Private land is also an important part of the Front’s conservation picture, dating back to the 1940s with the creation of winter-range preserves for big game and continuing with The Nature Conservancy’s vast Pine Butte Swamp Preserve and the Boone & Crockett Club’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch. More recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Area, thus inaugurating the most ambitious conservation-easement program in the agency’s history. The conservation area covers 562,000 acres of foothills and prairie between the Front and the towns of Augusta, Choteau and Dupuyer.

This is critical habitat for a variety of big game, raptors, game birds and other wildlife, and it’s mostly private land. FWS plans to acquire conservation agreements on up to 170,000 acres from willing sellers. These transactions would help keep maintain agricultural uses of the land, while shielding it from the rural sprawl that is overrunning some of Montana’s finest valleys. The beneficiaries of this program will generally be working ranches, ensuring they will remain in the hands of traditional families. We urge you to support this endeavor, which will require a major contribution from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Ask members of Montana’s Congressional delegation to endorse tapping the Fund for this purpose.