Untangling a ‘Land Disaster’

Bob Dennee began his personal recollection of events the same way most people involved at the time did: with a deep breath as though preparing to dive deep underwater, a pause, and the declaration of a year. It was 1992, and Dennee was the lands and realty officer for Gallatin National Forest. Big Sky Lumber had bought the 146,000 acres in the Gallatins and had presented it on a platter to the Forest Service in exchange for a smattering of other timber-laden and accessible squares in the region, as well as another piece of land known as the South Block in the Madison Range.

Dennee was the lead contact in dealings between Big Sky Lumber and the Gallatin National Forest and has what he calls a “corporate memory” of the land he’d become intimately familiar with over his career. When he talks about the history of mountain ranges in southwest Montana, it’s like listening to a witness to Pangea.

“Most people today … they don’t recognize what took place in the 1990s and early 2000s to consolidate lands in these four mountain ranges: Madison, Gallatin, Bridgers and the Absaroka-Beartooths. It’s just all national forests,” Dennee said. “Most people don’t recognize, well, how did that happen? It used to be all checkerboard.”

Blixseth and his partners had bought the land not for what it could do for them, but what they knew it meant to the Forest Service and area conservationists—and what those parties would give up in exchange for it. Attorney Joe Sabol represented Big Sky Lumber in the deal.

“[Sabol] saw the long-term public value of acquiring and protecting the lands in Porcupine and Taylor Fork, and he did his best to push the owners in that way,” Dennee said.

Dennee said he spent countless hours in Sabol’s downtown Bozeman office drafting proposals alongside Blixseth, the McDougals and Sabol. Dennee, who is retired after 40 years following a legacy of land negotiation on behalf of the Gallatin Forest, said this negotiation in particular, “was a very significant part of my life.”

The exchange was made possible by two congressional land transactions: the Gallatin Land Consolidation and Protection Act of 1993, or Gallatin I, involving the Porcupine and South Cottonwood drainages; and the Gallatin Land Consolidation Act of 1998, or Gallatin II, involving mostly the Taylor Fork, Bridger and Bangtail ranges. Pat Williams, Montana’s congressional delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1979 and 1997, whose service is most marked by his conservation advocacy, sponsored the bills.

“We were facing a land disaster in the Gallatin,” Williams said. Originally from Helena, Williams spent his public life conserving the landscape he’d grown up in—he passed legislation to establish the Rattlesnake Wilderness in 1980 and the Lee Metcalf Wilderness in 1983—and with the initiative in the Gallatins, he felt a sense of urgency. He, alongside other conservationists, feared that between brute timber extraction and a looming interest in real estate development, they would soon witness the complete loss of a critical wild landscape.

“Just north of America’s first national park, Yellowstone, the Gallatin Range connects the other mountains of the Yellowstone Ecosystem much like spokes in a wheel,” Williams was quoted during the congressional hearing.

Gallatin I was well received. The individuals and organizations that testified in support of the bill were of note: Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, Bozeman Mayor Timothy Swanson, the Montana Wilderness Association, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy, among others. Blixseth remarked that the conservation community and the timber industry being agreeable to a deal made about more than just dollar signs marked a unique moment.

“Certainly today, if we didn’t do this trade with the Forest Service, we would make a lot more money,” Blixseth said at the hearing. “There is a tremendous demand for these properties. There seems to be a big flock of people to the state of Montana just to buy a piece of the wilderness.”

By way of the two acts, the Gallatin National Forest acquired a total of 101,000 acres of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem between 1993 and 1998, most of which had been marooned in checkerboard squares in the Gallatin Mountains. In return for the exchange, Big Sky Lumber acquired 5,763 acres in the north Bridgers, three sections in the Bangtails, one section in the South Fork of the West Fork Gallatin and 12,414 acres on the Flathead and Lolo national forests. This exchange included the South Block, a 15,200-acre parcel nestled to the east of Lone Mountain near what was then the sleepy ski town of Big Sky. In 1999, Blixseth opened the Yellowstone Club on that land, proving his instinct in the helicopter less than 10 years before would yield a great business opportunity.

Setting the Board

The story of this land swap is of course a story of land value, but to truly understand land value in the West, it’s important to understand the region’s railroad history. When the Northern Pacific Railroad Charter was signed in 1864, much of the country’s wealth was concentrated in the East. The charter was a grant provided by Congress to spread infrastructure to the unruly West with the intention of hauling and extracting resources and encouraging homesteading. It granted land in 640-acre offset squares known as sections; odd-numbered sections were given to private railroad companies and the federal government kept even- numbered sections. Many of Montana’s mountain ranges were chopped into this checkerboard.

Northern Pacific began railroad construction in 1870. In 1880, it consolidated to Burlington Northern Railroad and in 1988 formed a public company, Burlington Resources, to manage its resource assets. A corporate split established the subsidiary Plum Creek Timber Company, which inherited the surface estate of Burlington’s remaining land; mineral rights transferred to Meridian Minerals, among others.

When Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872, the Gallatins were excluded due to their complicated checkerboarding, leaving them an exposed, fragmented arm stretching north from the park’s upper boundary. Still, conservationists who’d had their eye on the land even before Blixseth’s fly-over didn’t yield in their efforts to preserve it. In the 1977 Gallatin Forest Plan, the range was designated a Wilderness Study Area, granting it temporary protection.

By the early 1990s, Plum Creek owned 146,000 acres of squares across the Gallatin, Madison and Bridger ranges, which were intermingled with sections of other public, state and private land. Unable to extract resources from a majority of their land, whisperings of Plum Creek’s intent to sell trickled through the region.

That’s when Bob Kiesling perked up. Kiesling was the founding executive director at The Nature Conservancy’s Montana-Wyoming field office.

“That was going to create an opening for who?” Kiesling recalled of Plum Creek’s potential sell-off. “For somebody, for some government agency, for some institution like mine, The Nature Conservancy,” Kiesling said. “I mean, who would be interested in those lands that were checkerboard and private?”

If there’s anyone who recalls just how close the Gallatin and Madison ranges once were to coming under conservation ownership, it’s Kiesling. He teamed up with personal and professional acquaintance Bob Anderson, the founding executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, and by around 1985, they had outlined a vision of consolidating railroad lands, “creating a contiguous, continuous block of public land from Bozeman down to Yellowstone.”

They called it the Second Century Project, a name with meaning: If the “first century” was when the railroad land grants were issued, the “second century” would blueprint the next iteration for these spliced lands.

“Co-mingled like this, where the corporations own every other section mixed in with public land every other section, it’s unmanageable for both, so let’s figure out ways to move things around the map here like chess pieces,” Kiesling said. “Let’s figure out how to block up public lands where it’s most important to do so, and figure out how to get the corporations out of these highly important wild lands and into other places where they can make an economic return more sensibly.”

Just as they were setting pieces, the team fell apart. Anderson was ousted from GYC and Kiesling wasn’t able to shoulder the Second Century Project on his own. With the arrival of The Nature Conservancy’s new president, Brian Khan, Kiesling was also feeling a dramatic shift that ultimately led to his departure.

By the end of the century, Plum Creek closed its mill in the Gallatin Valley, shuttering local timber production, and murmurings of a massive land sale increased in volume. This time, it drew the attention of Michael Scott.

“There were quiet discussions that went on,” Scott recalled. Scott was GYC’s first program director for six years before he served as their executive director between 2001 and 2008. With fresh staff, GYC, The Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society partnered to create a vision to transfer the roadless lands to the Forest Service through the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This included Porcupine Creek in the Gallatin’s Wilderness Study Area, which was rumored to soon become a massive luxury golf course development. The portions with roads would continue to be managed for timber production. Plum Creek’s shut-down mill would be converted into a value-added mill, producing building materials for the developing Gallatin Valley.

“The idea there was to protect the best of what was there and manage the rest in a more sustainable way with less impact on the ground, but maintain the mill in a way that could still produce jobs in the Belgrade area,” Scott paused the same way Kiesling had when he moved into the demise chapter of his vision.

“That all blew up for a variety of personal reasons,” he said.

It wasn’t a matter of cash, explained Scott. “It came down to personality differences,” he said. The personalities being TNC’s new figurehead, Khan, and Charlie Grenier, Plum Creek’s executive vice president, and a prominent figurehead in the West’s timber industry for over a decade.

“The rumors at the time were that it came apart from conflict between the negotiators, as opposed to conflict over what the price of the deal would be,” Scott said.

Enter Blixseth in his helicopter, a character quite unlike any this effort had yet seen. Blixseth—and the many stories written about him—tend to chart the timeline of his life by monetary ups and downs: He grew up on welfare in the logging community of Roseburg, Oregon; as a kid he sold three donkeys at a $150 profit after rebranding them as pack mules; he made his first $1 million with an investment in Crown Pacific; he founded the Yellowstone Club with a pickup truck and a hammer. By 1988 his endeavors included a string of defaulted timber sales and bankrupt business ventures. Still, Blixseth’s aptitude for recognizing opportunity was sharp, and it felt fitting that a man with a lifetime of land jiggering under his belt would successfully consolidate the Gallatins where others had struggled.

“I would say that I had to look at things that aren’t, and try to envision what they could be,” Blixseth said.

In 1992, Blixseth’s Big Sky Lumber bought the 146,000 acres of checkerboard squares in the Gallatin, Madison and Bridger ranges, as well as Plum Creek’s sawmill, for $27.5 million, turning a page that had been stuck for decades.

Serendipity

“I never had a vision of Yellowstone Club,” Blixseth said. “When we first bought the property, there was roughly 15,000 acres surrounding a major ski resort, Big Sky. And I just felt that the 15,000 acres had to be worth more than just cutover timber land.”

The Yellowstone Club, an elite mountain haven for the wealthy, broke ground in 1997. The club filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Blixseth left while facing a divorce and legal trouble, some of which ended in jail time for the former timber baron. In 2009, the club was purchased by Boston’s CrossHarbor Capital Partners.

Today, behind a security checkpoint lies 2,900 acres of private skiing, a 28,000-square-foot golf course, 40 miles of private hiking and mountain bike trails, fine dining and countless multi- million-dollar condos and homes. The neighboring Spanish Peaks Mountain Club and Moonlight Basin, also constructed on former Big Sky Lumber land, have taken a similar form. In January 2025, picking up the same tools Blixseth used, the Yellowstone Club exchanged 6,110 acres of private land for 3,855 acres of Custer Gallatin National Forest land in the Crazy Mountains and Madison Range. While both celebrated and criticized, this recent action echoes one thing from Blixseth’s trade: sweeping impact.

“Do I think it’s good for the community?” Blixseth said of the Yellowstone Club. “I think it’s provided a tremendous amount of jobs. It’s certainly driven real estate values through the roof. The negative? It’s probably priced a lot of the locals out of the Big Sky market, and it’s probably increased traffic a lot,” Blixseth paused, a smile clear even over the phone. “And there’s probably more egos per square inch than should be.”

Today, Blixseth’s passion is writing music. He speaks enthusiastically about “Heart of America,” the song he wrote in 2005 for the Today show’s Hurricane Katrina benefit and how in a year, it raised $147 million. This fall, the band Cycamore gave it new life, a revitalization Blixseth is happy to see.

“After you die, if you write a song that’s a hit song that people will play 50 years from now, that’s more satisfying to me,” Blixseth said. “If you make a billion dollars, as soon as you die they don’t put your name on all those billion dollars.”

Blixseth leaves behind another legacy through his role in the land swap story, a narrative that has chapters yet to be written. While the consolidation accomplished in the ’90s set a playable board, today’s interested parties (still many of those same conservation groups) have yet to decide what game will be played there. The land is consolidated, yet as a Wilderness Study Area, it lacks permanent protection, and the need for such is increasing. That “tremendous demand” to buy a piece of Montana wilderness Blixseth observed in the ’90s has only grown as attention on Montana magnifies. This isn’t lost on the conservation world.

The Gallatin Forest Partnership, represented by GYC, The Wilderness Society and others, launched a proposal in June 2024 that would protect 250,000 acres across the Madison and Gallatin ranges, but at this stage, it remains a debated proposal.

“There’s a reason this final designation of the Hyalite-Porcupine-Buffalo Horn has not been resolved,” Dennee said. “It’s because of the strong different interests in how best to manage that landscape.”

While he comments that the partnership’s proposal is “a compromised solution,” Dennee, who still works as a part-time consultant with the Forest Service, offers the reminder that altering the fate of a massive piece of ecosystem is not like switching on a light. The work is incremental.

“It takes incredible patience and persistence and time and effort to put together land agreements of this scale. It’s not done easily,” Dennee said. “And I feel like looking back, I was in the right place at the right time.”

Blixseth too, believes in serendipity.

“I think there’s a reason for just about everything,” he said.