Since 1958, Wild Montana has been leading the effort to protect the wild public lands, waters, and wildlife that make Montana so wonderful. We’ve protected millions of acres and miles of rivers and streams, growing the movement for Montana’s wild places into an irrepressible force tens of thousands strong. We’re proud to uphold the legacy of Montana’s conservation champions and committed to a wild and connected future for Montana’s people and wildlife.
Originally called Montana Wilderness Association, Wild Montana was founded in response to increasing privatization and development in southwest Montana’s wild high country. Since then, we’ve expanded our work to every corner of the state and welcomed tens of thousands of members and supporters from across the country to support the fight for Montana’s wild future.
Two years after the first draft of the Wilderness Act, Ken and Florence Baldwin met with 20 friends at the Baxter Hotel in Bozeman. All shared a passion for Montana’s wild places and a desire to defend intact wildlands and rich wildlife habitat from increasing timber harvest and road building.
In a letter announcing the new organization, Ken Baldwin wrote:
“This Association is dedicated to making a place for all Americans to enjoy, to the fullest extent, the beauty and peacefulness of this ‘Land of the Shining Mountains’ where unspoiled wilderness, wild rivers, wild animals, fish in clean streams, and clean campgrounds are everywhere.”
General store owner and future MWA president Cecil Garland begins a fight to protect the Lincoln Backcountry from road building and industrial logging, a fight that culminates with the designation of the Scapegoat Wilderness in 1972. Around this same time Doris Milner, another future MWA president, embarks on a twenty-year campaign to restore a quarter-million acres to the Selway-Bitterroot and the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Areas.
That same summer, the Baldwins led the first unofficial Wilderness Walk in the Crazy Mountains. Today, Wilderness Walks attract hundreds of participants every year to explore and deepen their relationships with Montana’s wild places.
After years of meetings, hearings, and revisions, the Wilderness Act becomes law in September. It designates 1.5 million acres of Wilderness in Montana including the Anaconda Pintler, Bob Marshall, Cabinet Mountains, Gates of the Mountains, and Selway-Bitterroot. MWA members testify repeatedly in support of the act. Howard Zahniser, who drafted it, is a familiar presence at MWA gatherings and declares Montana “the most supportive of wilderness” in the country.
The appetite for new conservation legislation reaches a high point following the Wilderness Act’s passage. In the following years, MWA members and supporters successfully campaign for new legislation to protect over 2.6 million acres of wild places across Montana.
Tireless work by MWA advocates leads to eight new wilderness areas in Montana: the Scapegoat, Mission Mountains, Medicine Lake, Red Lock Lakes, UL Bend, Absaroka-Beartooth, Great Bear, and Welcome Creek. These eight areas represent over half of Montana’s current total. In 1978, Congress designated the North, Middle, and South Forks of the Flathead River and three sections of the Upper Missouri River as Wild and Scenic Rivers.
Senator Lee Metcalf, a Montana conservation legend, leads the effort to pass the Montana Wilderness Study Area Act, incorporating one million acres into nine wilderness study areas. Today, Wild Montana is still fighting to protect these WSAs from lawmakers seeking to strip their longstanding protections.
As the conservation movement matured in Montana and around the country, MWA began evolving from a volunteer-driven organization to one with a professional staff supporting the efforts of citizen advocates.
Linda Stoll is hired as MWA’s first employee, the first in a long line of committed professional advocates for Montana’s wildlands. She’s joined shortly afterwards by John Gatchell, who serves MWA in numerous roles during his 35-year career and plays a pivotal role in pioneering the collaborative conservation approach Wild Montana uses today.
That same year, MWA President Doris Milner won her long-running campaign to unite the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return, creating a virtually unbroken 3.5 million-acre Wilderness, the biggest outside Alaska.
President Ronald Reagan signs a bill designating the Lee Metcalf Wilderness to posthumously honor the former Montana Senator. MWA members had worked closely with the senator for years to protect Montana’s wildlands. Despite numerous broadly supported legislative proposals, there were no wilderness designations between 1983 and the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act in 2014.
The president uses a pocket veto to kill the bipartisan Montana Natural Resources Protection and Utilization Act, which would have protected over 2,000,000 acres of worthy wildlands, including 1.4 million acres of new Wilderness. This sets the stage for Wild Montana’s ongoing campaigns to permanently protect millions of acres across all nine of Montana’s national forests.
Years of boots-on-the-ground work by John Gatchell and other advocates lead to timber workers and conservationists signing the Kootenai and Lolo Forest Accords. The accords end years of conflict and create a blueprint for collaborative forest management that’s still used today.
Wild Montana sues the federal government after it grants Solenex LLC a permit to drill on an illegally issued lease in the Badger-Two Medicine, a wild area outside Glacier National Park sacred to the Niitsitapi (Blackfeet). This begins a campaign to protect the Badger that is still ongoing, and Wild Montana is proud to support our Blackfeet partners in the effort to secure the Badger’s wild future.
The first decade of the 2000s marked the beginning of many high-profile state and national campaigns that remain central to Wild Montana’s mission.
Following 18 months of advocacy by MWA members and supporters, President Bill Clinton uses the Antiquities Act to designate the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. 16 years later, MWA leads the Hold our Ground campaign to defend the monument and the act from President Donald Trump’s unlawful attacks.
In short order, Wild Montana plays pivotal roles in supporting legislation to protect millions of wild acres. MWA initiates the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Project and works with Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester to introduce the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act and Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. These visionary pieces of legislation exemplify the bold landscape-scale approach to conservation that will become one of Wild Montana’s calling cards.
Recognizing the need to maintain our public trails, Wild Montana launches our trail stewardship program with an initial focus on the Continental Divide Trail. Today, our Volunteer Trail Crew mobilizes hundreds of volunteers every summer, and in 2021 surpasses $1,000,000 of in-kind contributions to Montana’s public trail system.
During the 2015 Montana Legislature, Wild Montana mobilized thousands of Montanans to defeat fringe legislation that would facilitate federal land transfer. This was the first victory in the ongoing struggle to defeat extreme anti-public-lands crusaders and keep public lands in public hands.
When Sen. Steve Daines and then-Rep. Greg Gianforte introduce legislation to strip protection from more than 800,000 acres of wilderness study areas – the biggest such rollback in Montana history – Wild Montana leads a massive grassroots effort to stop them. The Our Land, Our Legacy campaign mobilized thousands of Montanans to defeat these bills and set the groundwork for a wild future for WSAs.
Since 1958, we’ve been keeping it wild. Now, we’re excited to embark on a new era as Wild Montana, elevating a name we’ve used for our newsletter since 1982 and our website since 1998.
As Wild Montana, we reaffirm and renew our commitment to uniting and mobilizing communities to keep Montana wild, a mission to ensure:
Our work has evolved since 1958, but our wild spirit and commitment to keeping it wild remains the same.
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