The Rocky Mountain Front

A pond on the Rappold Ranch ©Jim Steinberg

Help conserve the Rocky Mountain Front          Donate Now    Learn more about this project with the Online Field Guide.   How to conserve the Front is the subject of a new DVD called "Landscape on the Edge."

Why the Conservancy Selected This Site
The Rocky Mountain Front is a convergence of mountains and plains that stretches in a 50-mile-wide swath over 300 linear miles of Alberta and Montana. The Rocky Mountain Front and the greater Crown of the Continent Ecosystem have some of the greatest biological diversity in the lower forty-eight states. This region is one of the last places in the U.S. where the grizzly bear still ventures out onto the plains.

Threats
Montana's Rocky Mountain Front is now off-limits to new oil and gas leases, thanks to a new federal ban enacted in 2006. However, oil and gas development  in Canada continues as a threat - a scenario that, should it come to pass, would bring with it vehicle corridors, habitat reduction and introduced plant species.

However, the greater threat to the Front - and to the grizzly bear - is subdivision. Sales of remote ranches with high recreational or subdivision appeal are now commonplace.

Consider the home range of a grizzly bear, up to 250 square miles for males. Within that home range are several hard-pressed ranching operations, facing poor economic circumstances and the lure of high values per acre for recreational land. As with many Montana ranchers, the owners might be facing the prospect of retirement. Say each of those ranchers were to sell off 1,000 acres for human 'home-ranges' composed of roads, domestic animals, fences and development. These changes would be subtle, but cumulative. What is left in the wake of subdivision is a recipe for conflict, and in this conflict, the ultimate loser is the bear.

Animals
Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark encountered vast assemblages of mammals. While the wild buffalo is gone, virtually all other plants and animals the explorers encountered have survived here. Home to grizzlies, black bear, wolves, cougars, lynx, wolverine, elk, deer and moose, the Front is recognized by wildlife managers as ranking within the top one percent of habitat in the nation. Sandhill cranes, massive migrations of waterfowl, and a steady jetstream of raptors all rely on the area's abundant habitat.

Plants
The Front's myriad wetlands provide sustenance for diverse species of rare plants; at least a dozen species of vascular plants, three mosses, and a diatom are found in the wetlands of the Conservancy's Pine Butte Swamp Preserve. The Front's alpine habitat supports numerous rare plants, including two species that occur nowhere else on earth. However, one of the greatest overall values of this ecosystem lies in its rich fescues and other bunchgrasses, the foundation upon which much of the Front's chain of life is built.

Our Conservation Strategy
Banff and Waterton Lakes national parks in Canada, and Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex in the U.S. serve as the protected vertebrae of the Front's highest peaks. But a critical zone, where the mountains give way to the prairies, is mostly private - held in century-old ranching lands.

Private ranching operations have largely managed to share the Front's natural wealth with herds of elk and wandering grizzly bears. This sustainable management is in the best interest of ranching. And, tribal lands along the Front harbor not only the mirrored images of mountains in the still surface of a prairie pothole, but plants and animals the Blackfeet people hold sacred. For these reasons, conservation partnerships with local residents are the intelligent course.

Our presence in the area became established in 1978 with the purchase of the Pine Butte Swamp Preserve, a 16,000-acre coalescence of foothills, grasslands and fens where grizzly bears still nurture their young and search for summer berries. At the Preserve, we've been conducting research in prairie ecology and rangeland management. The results of our work have made a bridge with the community; over two decades, we've established working relationships with local ranchers, community leaders and neighbors that have allowed us to bring our goals to partial fruition.

Our strategy is to work with our partners to secure up to 450,000 acres of habitat used most heavily by grizzly bears, and to maintain critical linkages between public and private lands that enable bears to continue their seasonal movements. To do that, we work with a variety of partners using a variety of tools. These include accepting or purchasing conservation easements from private landowners, providing technical expertise to help other organizations acquire habitat, and developing new tools for conservation as we go. Some smaller but vital properties may be purchased outright and sold with conservation easements attached.

In addition to landowners, our conservation partners include the Blackfeet Tribe, Nature Conservancy Canada (not affiliated with The Nature Conservancy), the Southern Alberta Land Trust (establishment aided by The Nature Conservancy), and public agencies who purchase easements. Using this cooperative approach, we maximize our conservation dollars.

Easements purchased from long-established ranch families (Rappolds and Olsons) have gone a long way toward maintaining operations over the long term.

We have established a Rocky Mountain Front advisory committee to guide our conservation-project decisions, and explore mutually beneficial conservation and economic development ideas with local ranchers and community leaders. To date we have examined alternative beef marketing, protection of key properties through innovative land partnerships, the concept of grass banking, and areawide weed management strategies.

In addition to our partnerships with area ranchers, The Conservancy is assisting a private, non-profit land trust on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the first of its kind in the country. The Blackfeet Trust mission is to "...preserve native plants and animals and perpetuate a respect for the land consistent with the culture and heritage of the Blackfeet Nation/people." The Trust will enable the Blackfeet to reclaim and protect non-tribal inholdings, lands once held under tribal ownership. In collaboration with the Trust, high-quality prairie foothill, prairie pothole, and wetland ecosystem lands, in particular, will be protected from development.