Conservancy protects 1 million acres in Montana

GREAT FALLS — Candland and Alice Olsen didn’t want to see their small Montana ranch in the forest on the Upper Big Hole River split into smaller parcels once they’re gone.

Now, the 515 acres they own in the forest southwest of Jackson is protected thanks to a conservation easement that restricts development. The couple worked with The Nature Conservancy on the transaction. The easement, Olsen said, will protect the “sanctity of it.”

“I felt that I had too much concern over the wildlife and everything,” Olsen said.

The conservation easement put the Olsens at ease about the future of their cherished land. And, combined with another recent easement on the Rocky Mountain Front, this one 14,000 acres, it put the The Nature Conservancy over a million acres of land protected in Montana.

That’s about an acre protected for every resident.

“To me it’s unbelievable we’ve reached that size,” said Dave Carr, a Nature Conservancy program manager in Helena and a 24-year employee. “That’s a very large amount of land we have helped protect and conserve, and many of those lands are what I call working lands. They’re still being used. They just won’t be subdivided.”

It took 35 years for TNC to reach the million-acre milestone, which the group announced earlier this month. The largest conservation organization in the world, TNC opened its doors in Big Sky Country in 1978 when it secured its first conservation easement in the Blackfoot River Valley, one of the state’s first private conservation easements, Carr said.

Today, the organization has had a hand in protecting 1,004,308 acres of land statewide, from ranches in the Rocky Mountain foothills of north-central Montana in grizzly bear habitat to unbroken native prairie on the northeastern plains to forested land in the river valleys of western Montana.

Lands TNC works to protect often are privately owned ranches that feature native habitat and wildlife, but the aim isn’t to end agricultural uses.

“We very much like to see lands stay in some productive use,” Carr said. “We feel that for long-term conservation, if the community is not part of that decision or doesn’t buy into that, it won’t be lasting.”