A Columbia Falls woman who is no stranger to public lands advocacy hopes to preserve a key piece of land east of the Flathead River.

Keagan Zoellner recently pitched the idea of keeping about 50 acres of what was once farmland as open space near River Road to the Columbia Falls City Council.

“The community has vehemently spoken out against development,” of the parcel, she noted in a recent interview.

Zoellner  is the state director of Mountain Mommas, a nonpartisan group of women dedicated to public lands preservation.

Its mission statement sums it up succinctly:

“Protect our air, water, climate and public lands for future generations.”

To that end, Zoellner hopes to work with the current landowner and community stakeholders to preserve the property, much like what was done with the Bad Rock Wildlife Management Area just to the north of Highway 2.

That project was brokered by the Flathead Land Trust, leveraging Federal Land, Water and Conservation dollars with a local match of private and public funds. 

Zoellner noted that the state has already set aside marijuana tax monies for conservation projects and the LWCF has already had a great impact in the Columbia Falls community.

LWCF funds, which is a 1:1 match program, were used to build the skate park in the city and to also preserve tens of thousands of acres of F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber lands just north and east of the city that people recreate on almost daily.

“The value of public lands to Montana families cannot be understated,” Zoellner said.

Public lands are often places where youths catch their first fish, bag their first peak, shoot their first deer.

Zoellner and her husband, Guy, are well-known in the wilderness community. For 14 seasons they lived in Big Prairie in the heart of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Guy, a Whitefish native, was the trails manager for the area and they lived in a modest cabin there, raising two small children along the way. Zoellner barely made it out for the birth of her daughter. The season goes from June to October and she was pregnant throughout, having her daughter just a couple weeks after getting out of the wilderness on horseback one October.

It was all part of a unique Montana life. 

A weekend family trip, for example, might take them to the Chinese Wall, a landscape so divine that most people only make it there once in a lifetime, never mind a few times a season (it’s a two-day hike just to get there for most people).

Zoellner recalled one moment in Brushy Park, which is on the west side of the Chinese Wall with her young son. The kids used to make stick fishing poles and the boy was only about four years old when he made himself a pole and went about fishing the small creek that runs through the meadow (it’s not nearly as brushy as its name would imply).

Zoellner thought nothing of it as they set up camp and the boy fished.

When she walked up to him, he had not just one fish, but a full creel of them.

That’s the power of public lands, she noted. Unforgettable memories.

For the first time this year the family will not be living in the wilderness. The children are in their teens and there’s soccer to be played and modern lives to be lived.

Zoellner misses most of it, except for washing laundry by hand.

Prior to her stint in the wilderness, Zoellner was the executive director of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation. It was  much smaller organization back then, but they still got a lot of stewardship done in the 1.6 million acre wilderness complex.

Today she’s been busy advocating for public lands across the state. Mountain Mommas is still diligently working on land use in the Blackfoot Clearwater region, which would add more lands to the Bob, while opening other areas to multiple uses. They’re also working on a bill in Congress that would make it more difficult to sell public lands.

As far as the land east of the river, it’s a project that could most certainly come to fruition. The land has been on the market for years.

Like most land deals, perhaps its time has come. It just needs a Mountain Momma and support of the community to bring it to fruition.