More legacy land becomes public

One more piece of the patch worked public and private land owned in the Swan Range was transferred to the public last month.

It was part of a $6.75 million, 2,500 acre deal that sold land in West Lolo Creek, Upper Petty Creek and the Seeley and Swan valleys from the Montana Legacy Project to the Forest Service.

The legacy project is spearheaded by the Nature Conservancy.

The 800 acres transferred in the Swan Range straddles the border between the Flathead and Lolo National Forests near Summit Lake, just north of the Beaver Creek drainage.

Anne Dahl of the Swan Ecosystem Center in Condon said the spot is an important corridor for grizzly bears and other wildlife. It allows animals to move between the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Mission Mountains.

“It was identified as an important Plum Creek area to keep from development,” Dahl said. “And it’s been there for a very long time.”

The parcel was one of four areas identified as grizzly bear linkage zones in the Swan Range around 20 years ago. It was a small portion of the 44,821 acres in the Swan Range the Montana Legacy Project bought from Plum Creek in 2008.

The 2008 purchase was made as part of a larger land deal with Plum Creek. The deal transferred 310,000 acres throughout Montana to the legacy project in order to protect the timber land from being subdivided into real estate land. In 2010, 110,000 acres of legacy land was transferred to the Forest Service.

The long-term goal for the project is to eventually transfer all of its land to public ownership.

Western Montana Program Director Caroline Byrd said the goal is three-fold—to protect and hold onto the natural landscape, to allow the land to contribute to the economy with projects such as timber management and to allow public access.

“A private buyer is probably going to build a house there, and is not going to want the public on their land,” Byrd said. “Now it will always be available.”

So far the legacy project has transferred all but 20,000 of its acres in the Swan Range forests over to the Forest Service.

Before the 2008 sale, much of Plum Creek’s land in the Swan was interspersed with forest service land.

The land ownership pattern dates back to the early years of settlement in Montana, when railroads were given alternating sections of land for timber use.

Now the focus is to give the land ownership more continuity.

“Most of the land is slated for the forest service,” Byrd said. “Allowing them to manage their land as a whole has been a lot of these out-sales.”