American Prairie

Even Westerners aren’t as apt to scoff these days as population throughout the Great Plains continues to decline, just as they predicted.

”I can imagine how unsettling it is for Montanans, especially multigenerational Montanans, to see people come in and treat this like it’s some kind of suburban playground,” Roger Lang said from Sun Ranch

"Pam and I were worried that if it got in the wrong hands, the valley would be subdivided and split up,"

The result: Here in the heart of the Corn Belt, a majority of the folks who own farmland are not themselves farmers.

Dan Kemmis, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, introduced the possibility of a "Western Congress," so new policy directions might be set by those with a future in the preservation of the West, rather than coming from the nation’s capitol.

"There is no other place in the state where an entire drainage area will have been protected if they pull this off," said Fielder, a Macy friend. "It’s really the next big thing in Colorado."

"There will come a time when the profit of ranching is gone," says Susan Nottingham, 52. "Then what do you do with the land?

GOCO was created by Colorado voters in 1992 and charged with using lottery proceeds to protect open space, parks and wildlife.

"Fragmentation zones," Hillary said, are swaths of wildlands that are being cut off from one another by development. Were the lands north of Montana "fragmented," said Tembec’s Dennis Rounsville, "it would not bode well for the wildlife and the connectivity of the ecosystems."

"We’re looking for a group of ranchers who are ahead of the curve," White said. "Jim made the leap from the adversarial to becoming part of a team."