Public access and wildlife connectivity maintained

Before the pandemic, 2019 saw Glacier National Park host more than three million visitors. In 2020, Montana's housing market boomed, with a recent Housing Heat Index report from Bankrate ranking the state second nationally behind Utah for market growth.

Combine these pressures-tourism and new real estate development-and the region's rural character and wildlife can quickly lose out. As valleys fill and recreation hotspots clog, the pace and impact of human activity intensifies and animals are forced to move and adapt.

It adds up to an urgent need to conserve the right pieces of land: keystone corridors, often across valley bottoms that link mountain strongholds, the channels that give wildlife the chance to continue moving around the landscape while also spacing out development in and around rural communities.

Vital Ground and the Flathead National Forest helped solidify just such a corridor this month with the purchase of 10 acres bordering public lands along the North Fork of the Flathead River, just west of Glacier National Park near Polebridge. Utilizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), the Glacier Gateway project maintains public access to one of the national park system's crown jewels while also protecting an important habitat connection for grizzly bears, elk, wolverine and numerous other wildlife species.

For generations to come

A land trust working across western Montana and northern Idaho, Vital Ground provided administrative and financial support for the Forest Service's purchase of the parcel through LWCF. The national conservation program dedicates royalty fees from offshore drilling toward community land and water protection efforts ranging from municipal parks to fishing access sites. Last year, LWCF received bipartisan support and permanent funding from Congress as part of the Great American Outdoors Act.

"We are fortunate to have partnered with Vital Ground on this conservation acquisition in an area of such high ecological importance," said the Forest Service's Hungry Horse and Glacier View District Ranger Rob Davies. "It is a privilege to be able to manage this land for wildlife benefit, Wild and Scenic River values and public use for generations to come."

Vital Ground has completed several habitat conservation projects in the North Fork Valley in recent years, helping limit subdivision and dense development in a popular tourist area that also serves as a crucial habitat corridor between Glacier's Livingston Range and the Whitefish Mountains to the west. Vital Ground's One Landscape Initiative identifies and conserves key habitat linkages on private lands throughout the Northern Rockies, helping maintain the region's rural nature while reconnecting fragmented populations of grizzly bears and other wildlife.

Benefiting people and wildlife

In the Glacier Gateway project, wildlife interests combined with the call to maintain public access in the North Fork. Whether from Billings, Boston or Great Britain, visitors pass through the Polebridge area in droves during the warmer months to hike, float, fish, view wildlife or just savor a huckleberry bear claw from the Polebridge Mercantile. With the hot housing market portending denser subdivision and development, 10-acre projects like Glacier Gateway can have outsize impact, keeping channels into the mountains open for people and wildlife alike.

Meanwhile, waterway protections for the river itself-such as its National Wild and Scenic designation and the North Fork Watershed Protection Act of 2014-combine with a growing patchwork of land conservation to maintain the area's unique wild character.

"The Glacier Gateway project is an outstanding opportunity for collaborative conservation that benefits both people and wildlife," said Mitch Doherty, Vital Ground's conservation manager. "With the support of the Flathead National Forest we are bringing more LWCF dollars to Montana to support a growing need for improved public land access and conservation of key wildlife habitat in the North Fork Valley."

Connecting one regional landscape

Habitat connections in the North Fork don't just keep wildlife moving between the Livingston and Whitefish ranges. They combine with other key corridors across the region to promise a future in which bears, wolverine, Canada lynx and countless other species can move more freely on the landscape despite ongoing human pressures.

Vital Ground's One Landscape Initiative pursues conservation in these essential linkage points, from the Kootenai Valley in Montana's northwestern corner to the Ninemile area outside Missoula to the rangelands of southwestern Montana that link Greater Yellowstone with the vast Bitterroot Ecosystem of central Idaho. The initiative protects crucial acres through conservation easements and land purchases while also funding community bear-aware efforts to mitigate conflicts-everything from range riders and electric fencing for livestock to safe sanitation and bear spray education. By providing both land connections and the tools for coexistence, it promises a safer shared landscape for all who call the region home.

"One Landscape is simply a knitting together of the strongholds that remain," says Douglas Chadwick, a naturalist, author and Vital Ground trustee. "If we can build wildlife corridors-connectivity-between these remaining strongholds of wildlife, it will hold up over time."

An accredited land trust and 501(c)(3) organization, Vital Ground works cooperatively with landowners, communities, and federal, tribal and state agencies to conserve some of Earth's most magnificent and unique places for people, grizzly bears and entire natural communities. For more information and to view a new video on the One Landscape Initiative, visit vitalground.org.