Last Sunday evening, I made the drive home from the family cabin at Swan Lake as I have done so often over the years. Always, there is a dreamlike quality to those drives through the long summer twilight. For many miles the highway slices through the forested landscape in an arrow-straight line, disappearing from view only at the top of a distant rise.Here and there, a break in the forest crowding in along the highway offers a brief view of wet meadows and distant, snow-clad peaks. Swan Peak looms to the east just past Goat Creek. After Salmon Prairie, glimpses of the Mission Range reveal Hemlock Point, Mount Harding, McDonald Peak, Mountaineer Peak, Gray Wolf Peak and others that tease up memories of summer climbs in years gone by.
At those places where the view opens up, the rugged panorama looks so big and empty. For many of us, it is those pieces of beauty and the moments of appreciation that have always accompanied them that are the stuff of why we choose to live here and why love it the way we do.
The future of that precious landscape was always in doubt.
The same held true for areas all across western Montana where Plum Creek has significant land holdings. I would have to strain to remember a day over the last several years when the subject of the fate of Plum Creek lands did not come up in some conversation or at least cross my mind. After public meetings, where issues related to resource management, recreation, hunting or fishing were the topics, the questions always seemed to arise.
“What’s going to happen to the Plum Creek land?”
“Is anyone talking to Plum Creek about their plans?”
“What happens to us when Plum Creek develops their land next door?”
And so on.
Those questions came from people of all walks of life, from loggers to owners of second homes, from county officials to state legislators, from hunters and anglers to skiers and mushroom pickers. The recent series of stories in this newspaper by Michael Jamison underscored the importance of major land use decisions made by Plum Creek for all of western Montana. It was apparent that whatever decisions they eventually made would affect us all.
So for me, and I suspect many other folks who learned some more about the details of the recently unveiled Montana Legacy Project earlier this week, the news that 320,000 acres of the Plum Creek lands important to our western Montana communities are going to remain open, available for timber management and accessible for the gamut of recreation activities that the owners in the past have traditionally allowed was indeed a welcome announcement.
From the perspective of one who has at least a bit of a notion of what it might take to eventually pull off the entire transaction that was outlined earlier this week, the scope of the effort is absolutely breathtaking. It gives new meaning to “thinking big” when it comes to land conservation.
Even for the two national conservation organizations that have taken a great leap of faith with the project, the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Lands, this project is a whopper of a challenge. But I would also submit that there is no other way to create a meaningful and worthwhile strategy to deal with the eventual disposition of key Plum Creek lands.
As is usually the case when an effort is as far-reaching, complex and daringly ambitious as this one, there will likely be plenty of doubters, detractors, and naysayers along the way.
First, of course, the plan does not address all Plum Creek lands in Montana. Much of the company’s acreage will be unaffected by the Montana Legacy Project. I am sure there are folks who will be very disappointed that land they have been worried about is not included.
Others, especially folks from the east side of Montana, may wonder why bother with such expensive real estate just to keep things nice for the folks on our end of the state. After all, we are talking some major dollars to complete this acquisition. Our fears related to the large scale sale and development of those lands might seem pretty far-fetched to folks who can see nothing but open plains for miles and miles. It may take some big-time convincing to generate the necessary statewide support.
For the affected rural counties, any reduction in the private land tax base is always a concern. However, a considerable amount of the land is apparently slated to remain in private ownership with appropriate protection for the important natural values in place. Regardless, the partners in this effort have a genuine challenge ahead of them in convincing folks that over the long term, this project will benefit all of us, urban and rural.
Still others may not like it at all just because it wasn’t their idea.
But I, for one, don’t need a whole lot of convincing. In my world, I operate under the simple assumption that everything is connected. And it is my understanding that the basis for the selection of the lands that are included in this proposed acquisition are those very connective tissues that provide the vital and irreplaceable and richest biological links between the great swaths of landscape hard by the Continental Divide and the Crown of the Continent. These are the bare minimum of the Plum Creek lands that need protection. It’s that simple.
Yes, there are countless questions yet to be answered. There are legitimate concerns that will require serious and maybe painful consideration and thoughtful responses. There are unanticipated pitfalls galore ahead. Everyone who has labored to bring this agreement together knows that. I, for one, commend them all for their efforts- the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land and Plum Creek.
And how wonderful it is for the people of western Montana to join in support of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect something so important to us all - wildlife habitat, water quality and resources, all kinds of recreational activities and stewardship of our working landscape!
It will be a great feeling when the day arrives that we can all travel our western Montana valleys on a summer evening, secure in the knowledge that generations to come will be able to see that precious land looking much the same.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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