Elk. Dead elk.
A pair of cows, or maybe a cow and a big calf, 20 or 30 feet from the pavement. The images barely registered as I flashed by on my way to work. I’d driven Montana highways all my life and never seen an elk killed by a vehicle until that morning last summer, never heard of one being killed anywhere along there. I was kind of stunned. But elk had been crossing U.S. 93 on the stretch known as Maclay Flats, south of Lolo, Montana, for years. Traffic had been multiplying. I should’ve known it was only a matter of time.
I imagined two heavy thuds, big broken bodies launching through the high beams of a semi, probably just before daylight. It had to be a big truck to make them fly that far. The driver probably didn’t even touch the brakes. Freight’s got to be hauled, and a speeding truck is hard to slow. Deer are everywhere. A lot of semi bumpers are built heavy and high and swept back on the sides to line-drive their busted carcasses into deep right or left field. Drivers are trained to not swerve or brake suddenly, especially for a deer. But what a shame, to think an elk wasn’t worth braking for.
Their bodies lay there three days before a highway department crew picked them up. Every day, the sight of them set me thinking about life next to a booming city like Missoula, the ever-changing face of the countryside as new roads show up on the hillsides, then new houses, traffic flowing heavier and faster, highways widening, until every last fragment of open ground in the bedroom communities and feeder valleys and foothills seems vulnerable, fragile, about to be steamrolled by the steady juggernaut of development, smucked by a big semi-load of new roads and houses and people, whole herds of elk and other wild creatures flying off the bumper in slow-mo as their habitat becomes uninhabitable.
Elk live in the mountains and foothills on both sides of the northern Bitterroot Valley where U.S. 93 bisects it. Sometimes they live in the river bottom forest and feed in fields along the highway, and from time to time some brave the four lanes. To the west, that means threading through scattered houses and feeder roads between the highway and forested ground. These elk are somewhat citified compared to elk farther back in the mountains. But not sissified. They face the usual hazards—lions, bears, hunters, ice and snow, swollen streams and falling trees—but also have to figure out how to cross roads, fences and railroad tracks, deal with dogs and people, and find new feeding grounds and travel routes as foreign obstacles keep rearing up.
The same could be said of people who need open country. Rural culture erodes right along with the rural landscape. Ranchers and farmers start feeling crowded—and sometimes outvoted, outbid, outhustled—by newcomers. It’s hard to pull stakes on a house, barn, machine shop, grain silos and calving sheds and go find another ranch somewhere quieter. Discouragement sets in. The lifestyle loses its gravitational pull, and children and grandchildren spin away into easier and more economically rewarding occupations and lifestyles.
There comes a point when keeping a ranch in the family becomes impossible, when a herd of elk can no longer find enough feed or even an opening in the traffic to cross a highway, when hunting is no longer feasible or safe or socially acceptable, or even satisfying. If you’re a hunter or rancher or elk living in the path of development, it’s not likely to brake for you. If you’re standing in the fast lane, you’d better hustle on out of the way, or think fast about what else you might do.
At its northern end, the 70-mile-long Bitterroot Valley necks down as the rolling foothills of the Sapphire Mountains and steep, timbered slopes of the Bitterroot Mountains almost touch to form a beautiful natural gateway to the city of Missoula. Further south in the broad belly of the valley, Highway 93 is lined with businesses, billboards and rural subdivisions. As luck would have it, though, the 7 miles of foothills and valley floor closest to Missoula are more open, with no houses at all on the east side of the highway for a 2-mile stretch just south of Lolo.
East of the river, expanses of silver sage, gray-brown bitterbrush thickets, tan-gold grasses and fir-clad draws flanking Baldy Mountain provide winter range for 350 elk and nearly as many mule deer. The river bottom is a small wilderness thick with aspen, cottonwoods, ponderosa pine and winding creeks. A haven for songbirds, waterfowl and a host of other wildlife, including moose, lions, bears and porcupines, the river bottom is a designated Audubon Society “Important Bird Area.” The tawny, nearly treeless Miller Creek Divide, less than five miles from Missoula’s southern edge, is elk and mule deer heaven.
Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) big game biologist John Vore has conducted the spring game count in the Bitterroot for more than 20 years. “Every time I go up in the plane, I’m shocked and amazed to see more homes being built way back in the hills.”
Vore and fellow FWP biologists identified the north Bitterroot as one of the agency’s top conservation priorities in western Montana. Mike Thompson, regional wildlife administrator for FWP, says, “The bald hills between Miller Creek and Eight Mile Creek provide prime winter habitat for elk and mule deer, and the Maclay Ranch is the center of it all.”
This narrow, relatively unpeopled, unroaded reach of country also comprises one of the only east-west corridors in a 90‑mile‑long strip of farmlands, towns and housing developments—from Skalkaho Creek, south of Hamilton to Evaro Hill, north of Missoula—where wild animals still have a decent chance of crossing between mountain ranges. Elk use that corridor with increasing frequency. Moose, too. The potential exists for iconic species like grizzlies, wolverines and lynx—the wildest of North American wildlife—to carry fresh genetic materials back and forth between remnant, isolated populations via that corridor.
By the mid-1990s, the Bitterroot Valley was so fragmented by piecemeal development, skeptics wrote it off as a lost cause. But hunter-conservationists and local land trusts asked, What about the wildlife that has lived there forever? What about that Ahhhh feeling we all get when we leave the city behind and come to that beautiful stretch of countryside at Maclay Flats? Some landowners asked, What about a family legacy of hard work and love for a place? What about the heartbreak of seeing a ranch and a way of life evaporate before the heat of a fast-growing city?
Three or four families own much of the remaining open land, some having ranched there since the 1870s. The fate of the whole hinged largely on them. If one folded, the others would likely follow. At the turn of the 21st century, one ranch in particular seemed poised to go down: the 4,000-acre D.J. Maclay Ranch. One of the 10 largest ranches left in the Bitterroot, and the only one spanning the entire north valley, its boundaries lined the migration corridor between the Bitterroots and the Sapphires.
Just to the south, Tom Maclay, another cousin in the family, was busy laying the groundwork to build a four-season ski resort development on his land. The D.J. Maclay branch had far different hopes, yet were feeling pangs familiar to many ranching families. Too many negatives in their lives and ledgers—cattle prices not matching costs, new people and houses and traffic pressing in on all sides, old folks nearing the end and no grandchildren financially able to run the place—all of it combining to set them thinking hard about which way to go. Big truck a‑comin,’ picking up speed. Offers from developers had been coming their way for years, but they had consistently turned them down. In the many farms and ranches converted to residential subdivisions in the 1970s and ‘80s, they had seen what they did not want their ranch to become.
David J. Maclay, sometimes called D.J., his wife Frances and their three daughters, Annie, Helena and Elizabeth, known as Libby, loved nature in every season, hosting ice skating parties in winter, bitterroot parties each spring when the valley’s namesake flower bloomed, apple pressing parties in the fall. Calf branding and sheep-shearing were social events. Hikes, horseback rides, birdwatching expeditions were shared with many friends. The ranch was a centerpiece of a family legacy of outdoor adventures, and a source of family pride for the courage, hard work and resourcefulness it took to homestead it, build it up and keep it up. The ranch was not something with which the Maclays would willingly part.
D.J. Maclay’s father, Samuel, left Pennsylvania in 1879 on foot and traveled to Montana, often barefoot, “saving his boots for breaking ground on his homestead,” D.J. wrote in Blue Distance, his 1995 book of thoughts and reminiscences. Samuel reached Missoula in 1880 and claimed his homestead two miles south of Lolo. He and his wife Nellie continually enlarged and improved the ranch while raising four daughters and two sons—Samuel Sinclair, known as Clair, and David.
In the midst of the roisterous, land-hungry, fortune-seeking mix of humanity flooding the West, the older Samuel was something of an anomaly. He settled into farming with, as D.J. wrote, “. . . studied attention to the situation and his surroundings, as if he owed something to the soil and to nature.” Unlike the majority of prejudiced white people of that day, he was friendly to the native Salish people and allowed them to continue traditional sweatlodge ceremonies beside a spring above his house.
D.J., who purchased his older brother’s interest in the ranch, took after his father in industriousness, frugality, love of land and agriculture, and generous hospitality. He allowed many people to hunt, fish and traipse across it. D.J. also paid close and loving attention to his surroundings, particularly the wildlife. Earning a degree in biology in 1928 from Montana State University in Missoula (now known as the University of Montana), he kept farming until Depression-era commodities prices and plain hunger drove him off the ranch in search of a regular paycheck. His first paying job was packing mules into Glacier National Park. During the winter of 1934-35, he counted elk in the Sun River/Benchmark area on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front as a temporary junior biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, and spent the following two winters counting big game along the Selway River in Idaho. After a stint as the first fisheries biologist for the state of Idaho, David returned to farming in 1942, when WWII made farming profitable again.
That profitability didn’t last long. In the decades that followed, rising costs were seldom matched by rising prices for grains, hay, beef and wool. “The ranch was never a great ag-economy proposition,” says his youngest daughter, Libby. “You need at least 200 cows to support a family with a cattle operation. On top of all the elk and deer, the range would handle 130 cows, or 100 cows plus 400 sheep. And we could never grow enough hay.”
But Clair and his wife Charlotte and children, D.J. and Frances, and later their daughters and their families, kept the ranch going by frugality and hard work, supplementing ranch income with jobs and other enterprises. Helena worked in Missoula as an attorney. Annie, the oldest sister, raised sheep on the west side of the highway for many years before dying of cancer in 2002. Libby worked as a nurse in a Missoula hospital all the while living and working on the ranch and raising her twin sons.
The ranch work in recent years fell largely to Libby, who liked working with animals. A flamboyant and daredevilish horsewoman, Libby herded bulls, punched cows and chased mavericks through the brushy river bottom and steep draws like something unleashed from a Charlie Russell painting. She pulled lambs, calves and colts, hunted elk and deer, and protected her sheep and goats from lions and bears with deadly aim using an old .300 Savage rifle. She lived as far from the highway as she could get—first in a tepee in the ‘70s, and then in a century-old log cabin she bought, moved and reassembled on the South Fork of Davis Creek—despite needing to commute to Missoula to her nursing job. To this day she has no electricity, no phone line, no well; she pipes water in from the creek and lights the place with kerosene lanterns.
D.J. was a shrewd businessman. With frugality and discipline, savvy dealing and luck, he accumulated a number of commercial properties in Missoula and developed a successful property management business.
In the 1970s, he and Frances began gifting properties, including pieces of the ranch, to their children and grandchildren, doing their best to minimize inheritance taxes later on. They also began giving land away for public benefit. Helena says her parents believed that we’re not, as a society, providing enough places where people can easily enjoy the outdoors. The first gift of land from the family to the public was 40 acres on the Clark Fork River at Clinton, 15 miles east of Missoula, via Five Valleys Land Trust in 1971. Later they donated a 10-acre island in the Clark Fork River to Five Valleys Land Trust. Both parcels are now owned by Missoula County. In 1998 the family gave 68 acres along the Bitterroot River north of Lolo to the nonprofit Montana Natural History Center, which recently conveyed them to the state’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
Civic duty reinforced the Maclays’ motivation to conserve the ranch, but it was their own feelings about that particular piece of Montana that made them want to protect it. “Our father couldn’t sell it because he loved it too much,” Libby says. “It was also partly because he wanted to honor his parents.”
His daughters were cut from that same cloth, and determination was one of their strongest threads. Like D.J. and his siblings, they worked hard and endured much to keep the ranch together—through years of difficult and heart‑wrenching family meetings, and the usual kinds of contention among siblings, in-laws, parents and children—because they wanted to please their father and mother, and honor their grandparents, and because they loved it, too.
“If there was to be hope of passing this land on, as opposed to selling it to pay off inheritance taxes,” Helena says, “our parents had to start conveying it to their heirs. They didn’t like the complications of a corporation, partnership or trust, so they gave specific parcels to specific individuals without any restrictions.
“To convey land directly to children and grandchildren is very daring. Without restrictions, there’s no guarantee that children and grandchildren won’t completely dismantle a ranch, ” Helena says. “You have to trust that they’ll not do something to the land you don’t like.”
Dispersal of pieces of the ranch among children and grandchildren proceeded for over 35 years. Ultimately they were looking at a confusing patchwork of ownership that was difficult to manage as an operating unit and subject to the whims of individual owners. It was, as Helena puts it, “ripe for willynillyness.”
In 1997, knowing their parents were aging and that inheritance tax would be a certainty, Annie, Libby and Helena began working with Bruce Bugbee and Allen Fetscher, longtime family friends who are partners in a Missoula‑based conservation real estate business called American Public Land Exchange. Helena says, “After Dad’s death in 1997, we knew that when Mother died we would have to liquidate the property, or part of it, to pay the inheritance tax. But because we cared about what would happen to the ranch and hoped to keep it intact, we wanted to be selective about whom we sold it to. We needed to find someone who would not subdivide and build homes everywhere.”
People familiar with the conservation real estate market were skeptical about the family’s chances of finding such a buyer—or, for that matter, achieving any sort of conservation outcome for the ranch. “Bruce told us it would be difficult,” Helena says. “In fact, there were people who said it could not be done. Some of my colleagues in the legal profession said, ‘We’re all watching to see if you can pull this off.’“ The children and grandchildren of D.J. and Frances Maclay took it as a challenge. A little Maclay pride was at stake.
The first requirement was finding consensus among the family about keeping the ranch intact. With 10 members holding title to discrete parcels of the ranch, it was far from a given, despite the express commitment and determination of the older generations. D.J. and Frances’ grandchildren were in their late teens and early 20s. Each of them had a vote in deciding how to proceed because each owned his or her own lands that were operated as part of the ranch. “We showed our kids the options,” says Helena: “Sell it all, no strings attached, to a developer; sell it off piece by piece, as needed; or conserve it in some way.
“We cannot in all likelihood ever find a replacement for what we have,” Helena told them. “We’re selling more than just some ordinary real estate. If we sell it as one piece instead of piecemeal, we and other people will still be able to enjoy the views and open space. There would probably still be hayfields and cattle and wildlife. But we would not get as much money for it as we would if we sold it piece by piece. We would in effect lose personal freedom that more money could give us.”
To the amazement of their parents and advisors, each one of the grandchildren chose to keep developers at arms’ length and try to achieve a conservation outcome for the whole ranch.
The next few years were a roller-coaster ride. Most inquiries came from people who wanted to develop the ranch, or at least purchase it with no strings attached. Inquiries and proposals that showed promise soon withered.
Less pristine than many other Montana ranches, and already nearly surrounded by development, the Maclay Ranch was not quite what typical conservation buyers were seeking. For the same amount of money they could acquire a bigger, more isolated, more classic‑looking Rocky Mountain ranch—one without a four-lane highway, a railroad spur, a natural gas pipeline and two major powerlines running through it.
Brainstorming with Bugbee and others, the family decided to divide the ranch into two portions, 900 acres west of Highway 93, and 3,100 acres east of it. Maybe marketing them separately would bring a breakthrough. They rebuilt a 211‑foot cable suspension bridge that D.J. had built in 1964 so that it would safely take passenger cars and light trucks across the river.
News of the ranch’s importance to wildlife and the family’s willingness to work with the right conservation buyer had been circulating for years through a wide network of conservation groups and individuals, but until 2003 none came forward with enough money to make a serious offer. In that year, the National Audubon Society proposed building a regional visitor center on the ranch, and teamed with the Elk Foundation to present the family an offer well below appraisal. It included several contingencies which the family deemed too uncertain. The offer was rejected.
It seemed that conserving the ranch would hinge on finding a private buyer—someone who valued being just 30 minutes from a western Montana city with exciting cultural amenities, and someone who appreciated wildlife, nature, hunting and fishing. But the marketplace seemed devoid of buyers who fit that profile.
When Frances Maclay passed away in June 2006, the IRS pushed the button on the inheritance tax stopwatch. In nine months the family would have to pay up or face significant penalties and interest. After a decade of difficult deliberations, hard work and mixed but intense emotions about selling the ranch, the Maclays were weary. Maybe the naysayers and skeptics were right. Maybe it would be best to take the developers’ money and run.
Everybody in the conservation community, the ranching community, the hunting community could see the big semi coming around the bend, heading for Maclay Flats. The end seemed close at hand.
Early in 2006, recognizing that for conservation to be a viable choice for the ranch, conservationists urgently needed to formulate a plan of action, a handful of people from the conservation community met at the Elk Foundation’s headquarters in Missoula. Representatives from the foundation, Five Valleys Land Trust, Bitterroot Land Trust, the National Audubon Society, The Conservation Fund and Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks all agreed it was worth one final shot. Around the table there was a sense, a hope, that if everyone worked together, pooled resources, pulled out all the stops, turned over every stone, a solution might be found—or created.
After the meeting, Jim Gladen, then vice president of the Elk Foundation’s lands and conservation department, called Ron Marcoux, former vice president of lands and veteran lands‑deal negotiator for the Elk Foundation, and asked him if he’d like to take on a new project. Recently retired, Marcoux agreed to come to Missoula from his home in Helena and take a look at the situation.
Marcoux was acquainted with many of the leaders in the state and national conservation community and knew the strengths and specialties of nonprofits with an interest in the northern Bitterroot. As a former administrator with FWP, he was well acquainted with the agency’s people, policies and capabilities. After meeting Helena and Libby, neighboring ranchers, Bruce Bugbee, conservation leaders in the Missoula area and FWP personnel, Marcoux decided there was still a chance of pulling the rabbit out of the hat. (He’d done this before for the Elk Foundation on several memorable occasions, most notably the landmark Church Universal and Triumphant ranch deal immediately north of Yellowstone National Park.) So he agreed to lead a collaborative effort.
Participants in the March meeting came together again in May at RMEF headquarters, with Marcoux presiding, and agreed to use their networking capabilities and long contact lists to help locate a buyer. Although no one in that ad hoc task force knew it at the time, a conservation buyer had arrived on the scene. Mark Reiling, an outdoorsman and real estate developer from Minnesota, contacted Bruce Bugbee and expressed interest in the ranch. Mark had vacationed in Montana for a number of years and was looking for a Montana ranch to call his own. As a businessman with an eye to a sound investment, he sought a place with a high resale value, in a location where land values were likely to appreciate. As an avid hunter, he sought a place teeming with elk, deer, upland birds and waterfowl. The Maclay Ranch had it all.
The family urged Reiling to work with a qualified conservation organization in order to come up with a workable conservation plan. Reiling, who joined the Elk Foundation in 1996, approached the foundation for assistance. Because Marcoux and the Elk Foundation had led the collaborative effort, they were ready to help and presented solid guidelines for a successful conservation outcome.
The Maclays, working with Bugbee, had considered allowing limited development to take place on the ranch, if that would bring about a sale that kept the majority of the land intact. Using the Elk Foundation’s MAP Habitat program, they had identified a narrow strip of land just east of the Bitterroot River that was largely out of sight from across the valley, as the best place for any development to occur. Reiling was skeptical of the conservation conditions, but he was still interested and willing to think and talk about it.
Over several months of conversations, Marcoux and the Elk Foundation’s lead attorney, Grant Parker, another longtime friend of the Maclay family, helped iron out differences and craft a purchase agreement that met the goals of all parties. The Elk Foundation supported the concept of allowing a few homes to be built, as long as they did not impinge on big game travel routes or seriously impact the use of winter range. Here was the foundation linking arms with developers, traditionally the conservationists’ nemesis and bogeyman. But Reiling represented a new breed of developer, willing, even eager, to protect wildlife and other natural amenities, and savvy enough to make money at the same time. Here was a semi that would brake for an elk.
The purchase agreement allowed construction of seven new homes on the property, on a line of 5-acre homesites located to allow free movement of wildlife from the river to the foothills, thus preserving the connectivity corridor. It was not a pure conservation solution, but a reasonable compromise. With federal funding for habitat conservation at its lowest levels in 40 years, and state funding almost as scarce, the Elk Foundation looked instead toward a private solution. Many conservation easements allow for another homesite or building or two, or an access road. This one still met the foundation’s bottom-line criterion: it most definitely helped ensure a future for the ranch’s elk and other wildlife.
Done deal? Not quite. There is a period of time after a buy-sell agreement is signed called “due diligence.” Buyers are given a certain length of time to conduct a title search, inspect the property and make sure there will be no surprises once money has changed hands and the deal has closed. In that space of time, anything can happen. “In February of 2007 the deal was close to collapse,” Helena says. “It was before the due diligence period expired. We all wondered, What if it falls apart? What if the buyer walks away? I don’t think we could have kept everyone’s attention on long-range goals any longer.”
But to everyone’s great relief, the deal held. Ninety-eight percent of the eastern portion of the ranch would remain as it was and had been for millennia: open country pleasing to the eye, excellent habitat for elk, mule deer and an arkload of other wildlife.
The Elk Foundation’s participation was crucial to the consummation of the deal, because the Maclays needed to sell to beat the inheritance tax deadline and the buyer needed time to arrange financing. The foundation agreed to buy and hold the ranch, confident that Reiling would buy it from them, subject to a conservation easement to be held and monitored by the Elk Foundation, conserving all but 35 acres of the 3,100 acres east of Highway 93.
There will be another huge sigh of relief when and if the 900-acre remainder of the ranch west of the highway is protected. The pressure is off the Maclay family for now, but the rest of the ranch is still for sale, and remains the critical link for animals traveling between the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and the Sapphire Mountains.
Down the years, through the long whooooosshhh of growth and development, as newcomers in the north Bitterroot wonder how an island—or a peninsula, or, better yet an isthmus with wildlife crossings—of natural beauty and tranquility survived that holocaust, maybe some old guy wearing a grungy ballcap with an RMEF logo on it will take a deep breath, gaze at a herd of elk bedded on a distant hillside and tell the story.
And the listeners will say, “Wow. That was close, wasn’t it?”