The Imagine a place where rock-toothed peaks stab 4,000 feet straight out of the prairie, where the wind can howl 90 miles per hour for a week solid and where grizzly bears still stalk out onto the plains to scratch their backs against washboarded cottonwoods. Such is Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front.
Dupuyer Creek courses out of the Front 27 miles southeast of Glacier National Park and serves as a wildlife corridor. Depending on the time of year, it may host moose, numerous grizzlies, wolverines, whitetails and hundreds of elk and mule deer. Because of its grandeur and proximity to Glacier, Dupuyer Creek is also a bulls-eye for developers, and state biologists have identified it as some of the most vital and threatened habitat in the state.
Thanks to a conservation easement fully donated to the Elk Foundation by the Colin Phipps family, 2,900 acres of Dupuyer Creek is now forever protected. The parcel lies near the Bob Marshall Wilderness and is adjacent to a Nature Conservancy easement on the Boone and Crockett Club’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch.