AWR: The Rocky Mountain Front

Members of the Pikuni (Blackfeet) Nation know it as part of the backbone of the world - its jutting and undulating peaks the vertebrae that form the very face of the Rocky Mountains in Montana from Glacier National Park against the Canadian border southward almost to Lincoln. The Rocky Mountain Front - the "Front" - is a majestic span of rocky crags and fjord-like valleys that edge the Great Plains with startling contrast, its heights abruptly giving way to foothills that flow down into the eastward sprawling expanse of prairie.

This remarkably contiguous transformation of peak to prairie creates an ecotone, or ecological transition zone, that provides a sanctuary of unusual suitability for a rare array of wildlife. And it is this that reveals another sense in which the Front is a backbone - it has endured as an essential oasis of key habitat for a richness of biodiversity worthy of precolonial times - including many endangered, threatened, and sensitive species. Abundant herds of elk and North America's largest bighorn sheep herd share the Front's cascading banks and talus slopes with healthy populations of mule and whitetail deer, moose, black bear, mountain lion, bobcat, badger, wolverine, fisher, and fox. The cold mountain streams, fens and lowland marshes give home to beaver, river otter, Montana's native westslope cutthroat trout, and threatened Harlequin duck while high above, perched in cliffside niches and through the overstory of trees nest numerous hawk and owl species, as well as the threatened and endangered bald eagle and peregrine falcon. The Front also represents one of the scarce remaining locations where the majestic grizzly still wanders from the mountains onto the plains, its former historical range. And in the air still lingers the call of the endangered but recovering gray wolf. These lands are truly what wildlife professionals know them as - the "lower forty-eight's Serengeti."

The Front, as 1.6 million of public roadless wildlands, is host to such a rich diversity of life because it rests on the east edge of one of the country's great surviving wilderness complexes. To the west, over the ridges and steep valleys of the Front lie the Bob Marshall, Scapegoat, and Great Bear wildernesses - approximately 1.5 million acres of wildlands given federal protection by the Wilderness Act of 1964. While these designated wildernesses provide a relatively vast core system of lands secured from development, they also provide only a fraction of the year's habitat requirements for much of their wildlife. They compose only the interior of the Bob Marshall Ecosystem, which the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks has identified as including 2.4 million additional acres of surrounding national forest, state, and private lands which are critical to the long-term survival of the wildlife populations.