RACHEL FELL YELLOWSTONE LANDSCAPE FULL
RACHEL FELL YELLOWSTONE LANDSCAPE FREE

Which is a good thing, Gerrity says, because these ranches are really expensive. Driving around, you see signs everywhere that say, “Save The Cowboy, Stop The American Prairie Reserve.”īut the project’s efforts have garnered a lot of positive attention from international media outlets and celebrities like Tom Brokaw and Ken Burns.

The organization has purchased close to 30 properties so far, but it needs at least another 50. Those private properties come with expansive grazing leases on hundreds of square miles of adjacent, government-owned lands, allowing the reserve to exert more power over how those public spaces are managed. For the past 18 years, Gerrity and his team have been building this park, slowly buying ranches, and replacing cattle with wild bison. United States, 2019.īut right now, the American Prairie is still mostly a dream. Once completed, it will be the largest wildlife reserve in the Lower 48. Sean Gerrity founded American Prairie Reserve in 2001 after a career spent working as a consultant for Silicon Valley companies. “To work on something - pour your heart into it - and arrange it like a giant work of art and the public would by and large appreciate and realize it would last far, far beyond my lifetime? That just seemed like a dream come true,” Gerrity says. But Montana beckoned him back, where he realized he could build something that lasts longer, that’s more meaningful than a Silicon Valley company. He earned a lucrative living and a comfortable house in the hills above Santa Cruz, Calif. They eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where Gerrity consulted for big name companies like Apple and AT&T. But after college, he and his wife moved to the West Coast. He grew up hiking and hunting with his parents in central Montana. He’s always had an affinity for wildlife. Grey, curly hair, muscled forearms, nice plaid shirt. Gerrity looks like he just walked out of an REI catalog. But it took Gerrity, an ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to finally get this idea off the ground. Back in the 1830s, the painter George Catlin argued it should be protected as a national park. The idea of a massive wildlife preserve on the Great Plains has been around for almost two centuries. The Promise And Peril Of Environmental Philanthropy Others voice concern over the big-money donors allowing American Prairie to acquire multimillion-dollar ranches.īut in a state known as the Last Best Place, biologists believe American Prairie Reserve may represent the last best place to pursue a wildly ambitious restoration of the Great Plains - and at a time when many have lost faith in the government to protect wild places.Īs the reserve slowly grows bigger and bigger, a modern Western drama about change, loss and renewal is unfolding on this unforgiving landscape. As one cattlewoman told me, “for them to be successful, we can’t be here. It comes from a close-knit community of ranching families who view the reserve as an existential threat, removing them from the land they’ve worked for generations. On the ground, the reserve finds support among nearby tribes and with those who see economic potential in tourism. When it’s complete, it will be the largest wildlife sanctuary in the Lower 48 - about 5,000 square miles, nearly the size of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Making Gerrity’s vision a reality requires piecing together an existing national monument and wildlife refuge with private properties and their accompanying grazing leases to create a giant, rewilded grassland. On the river banks would be a mama grizzly bear with two or three little cubs walking along the mud there.” Wolves, grizzly bears, thousands of genetically-pure, wild bison. Its goal is to rewild this swath of the Great Plains and return all the animals that lived on this landscape more than a century ago, before white settlers arrived.

RACHEL FELL YELLOWSTONE LANDSCAPE FREE

It’s called American Prairie Reserve and it’s a new kind of national park - one that’s free to the public and privately funded by small donors and some of the world’s wealthiest people.

RACHEL FELL YELLOWSTONE LANDSCAPE FULL

A wild, rugged place full of steep coulees and unbroken plains. This is the country Gerrity wants to protect. “Those beautiful cliffs and the raking light coming across in the afternoon.” “What you’re seeing here is the incredible beauty of the Missouri River out in front of us,” he says. Once we reach its top, the flat, yellow prairie opens up into a stunning panorama of deep, white canyons cut through by a wide, silty river. On a recent summer afternoon, he climbs a steep, grassy hill in the plains of northeastern Montana to show me. But Sean Gerrity, founder of American Prairie Reserve, has always seen something more out here. It’s the drab, boring part of a cross-country interstate drive between Seattle and Chicago. The northern Great Plains aren’t much to look at.

Rachel fell yellowstone landscape