Additional mining language seals Great Montana Outdoors deal
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) A large conservation easement in northwest Montana is finally complete, now that language related to mining rights has been added to the deed.
On Monday morning, the Montana Land Board approved some additional language for the deed of the Great Montana Outdoors Conservation Easement that would emphasize that the easement wouldn’t stop exploration of the land’s mineral rights. The Land Board had previously approved the conservation easement on Oct. 21 by a vote of 3-2 with the caveat that the deed language would be modified.
A new paragraph was added that reiterated that “the Easement expressly allows third-party owners of the mineral estate and their lessees to enter and use the Land for exploration, recovery, and development of the minerals consistent with state law.” The language was approved by a vote of 3-1, with Superintendent of Schools Elsie Arntzen voting no and Attorney General Austin Knudsen not present.
With that, more than five years of work on Phase 1 of the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Project was complete. It started in early 2020 after the Weyerhaeuser Company announced it was selling 630,000 acres of Montana timberland to Southern Pine Plantation.
In January 2021, Green Diamond Resources Company of Washington state bought almost half that land from Southern Pine Plantation and worked with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the Trust for Public Land to create the 32,879-acre easement. After the FWP commission approved the easement in August, land board approval was needed due to the allocation of $1.5 million out of the Habitat Montana fund to pay part of the $39.5 million price tag.
Another $20 million is coming from the U.S. Forest Service Forest Legacy Program fund and that funding had to be used before December 2025.
The conservation easement had a huge amount of local support. Twenty sportsmen’s groups sent a letter of support, in addition to the county commissions of Lincoln, Flathead and Sanders counties.
Only two entities opposed the easement: Bozeman-based Citizens for Balanced Use and WRH Nevada Properties, which owns most of the mineral rights under Green Diamond’s land. Even though Montana law says that mineral rights owners “have the right to reasonable use of the surface, regardless of whether or not the surface owner grants permission,” the two entities sued FWP, the FWP commission, the Trust for Public Lands and Green Diamond to stop the easement.
WRH Nevada Properties claimed the easement would prevent them from exploiting their mineral rights. In October, FWP attorney Alan Daniel Zackheim said that wasn’t true. Now the deed language explicitly says WRH Nevada Properties can access their mineral rights.
But WRH Nevada Properties still wasn’t satisfied. On Monday, WRH attorney Peter Scott said WRH still found the easement objectionable. He pointed to a section that said the landowner was prohibited from conducting any extraction on 12,000 acres and claimed that would impair WRH’s operations, too. But Bill Schenk, FWP Land and Water administrator, said that wasn’t the case - Green Diamond owns mineral rights under those 12,000 acres, and it has voluntarily surrendered access to those.
“They don’t want to be in the mineral rights business, in the mineral extraction business. They’ve agreed through this easement that their rights would be impacted and that’s all they can do,” Schenk said.
Governor Greg Gianforte and Auditor Troy Dowling supported the language, but Arntzen repeatedly tried to make a substitute motion to push the vote back to Spring 2025, saying more information was needed and new people would be taking seats on the Land Board in the new year. Dowling and Arntzen will not be returning.
“This is not a delay - it’s a postponement,” Arntzen said.
Gianforte pointed out that Arntzen has opposed the easement “since the beginning,” but the easement was already approved in October and the board was just refining the deed language. The board could delay the vote but that would just create a “perpetual agenda item,” Gianforte said.
This easement is only Phase 1 of the Great Montana Outdoors project. The original plan was to put a conservation easement on almost 86,000 acres of Green Diamond property extending north and south of the Thompson Chain of Lakes along U.S. Highway 2. But FWP couldn’t raise the money to pay for an area twice as large. So Phase 2 is still in limbo.
The Land Board vote also approved a correction that reduced the size of the Phase 1 easement by 160 acres. During document review, Green Diamond representatives discovered clerical errors in the legal description of land tracts. The corrections resulted in a reduction of 160 acres for Phase 1 and an increase of 120 acres for Phase 2, for a net reduction of 40 acres over both phases.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.