Western Public Lands

The legacy of the West is defined by pristine, wide-open spaces. These cherished public lands are held in trust by the federal government, but they are being chipped away at an alarming rate.

Fly thirty minutes in any direction from anywhere in the Rocky Mountain West and one can’t help but notice the exponential growth in resource extraction and other human activity that is threatening America’s last great wild places.

Largely invisible are the stresses and strains on many small western communities struggling to protect public lands from aggressive energy exploration and other development. The delicate fabric of these rural communities is being torn apart as water and air quality are diminished, wildlife habitat is destroyed and heritage values are lost. EcoFlight’s Western Public Lands Program provides flight to address this energy development, hard rock mining and wilderness fragmentation that is destroying America’s western public wildlands.

EcoFlight’s Western Public lands Program target specific areas that include the Pinedale Anticline, Upper Green River Valley, the Powder River Basin and Red Desert areas of Wyoming; Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, The Rock Creek and Montanore Mines, the Badger-Two Medicine area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem; the Roan Plateau, HD Mountains,  the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre-Gunnison area and the Vermilion Basin of Colorado; the Otero Mesa and San Juan Basin of New Mexico and the Raton Basin of Colorado and New Mexico.