It is the first easement in Montana aimed directly at protecting native fisheries habitat and the largest easement in the history of the Missoula-based Five Valleys Land Trust, which brokered the agreement.
Grant Kier, Five Valleys' executive director, said the project could not have been completed without collaboration among all the stakeholders.
The agreement is part of the Blackfoot Community Project, a watershedwide initiative launched in 2004 to purchase and protect 89,000 acres of Plum Creek Timber Co. timberlands.
Plum Creek, the nation's largest private landowner, has identified 25 percent of its forest acres for possible sale for residential development, including large parcels in the Blackfoot watershed.
The 89,000 acres that the Nature Conservancy has bought from Plum Creek since 2004 is being resold to public land management agencies and to private landowners who agree to adopt conservation easements.
Conservation easements restrict a landowner's development rights in exchange for cash payments, tax reductions or other financial incentives.
The latest easement is the Nature Conservancy's first major sale of a former Plum Creek parcel to a private landowner under the Blackfoot Community Project.
Under the agreement, the Sunny Slope Grazing Association sold an easement on more than 4,600 of its acres to the Nature Conservancy.
That enabled the grazing association to purchase more than 2,800 adjacent acres that the conservancy had previously bought from Plum Creek. The acreage also was put under a conservation easement as part of the same transaction.
The agreement covers forests, grazing land and farmland southwest of Lincoln, including 3 1/2 miles along the Blackfoot River and more than 14 miles of Sauerkraut and Willow creeks.
Portions of the creeks have been trampled by cattle, creating problems for irrigation and fish, but the creeks are to be restored using federal funds. The creeks are potential spawning grounds for threatened bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout, a sensitive species.
The easement project was funded with $4.6 million from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Habitat Conservation Plan, which protects habitat for threatened and endangered species, and was administered by the FWP.
The grazing association once included several families but today consists of two families, the Thompsons and the Schwartzes, whose ranching operations are based along the Rocky Mountain Front and near Great Falls.
For nearly 50 years, the ranchers had leased the former Plum Creek lands in the Blackfoot watershed for summer pasture. The corporate lands were intermingled with the ranchers' lands, creating a checkerboard of ownership that is now one large protected block.
The Plum Creek ground “is an important part of our operation,” rancher Stew Schwartz said. “If the Plum Creek land was subdivided, it would have put a lot more people and houses in the middle of our cows and that doesn't make running cows any easier.”
The other partners in the agreement were Trout Unlimited's Big Blackfoot chapter and the nonprofit Blackfoot Challenge.
Jim Berkey, project manager for the Nature Conservancy, said the easement resulted from about three years of work between partners dedicated to preserving the Blackfoot's agricultural way of life, its open spaces and its native flora, fauna and fish.
“It's important not only for trout but for large carnivores and ungulates” because it preserves wildlife habitat and corridors connecting wilderness areas and public lands to the north and south, he said.
Hank Goetz, lands director for the Blackfoot Challenge, said it was gratifying to see ranchers being able to buy former Plum Creek lands they had long leased for pasture.
“This is a real milestone,” Goetz said. “The whole purpose of the Blackfoot Community Project has been to keep traditional ranches on the ground” rather than having them converted to residential development.
Reporter John Cramer can be reached at 523-5259 or at johncramer@missoulian.com
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