A Pedal Through the Prairie

The vast prairies east of the Rockies occupy a strange space in the American consciousness. For some, they’re defined by nostalgic cowboy tropes and the Old West; for others, endless, purely functional fields of wheat or soybeans come to mind.

For most, however, they’re perceived as a whole lot of nothing.

Just 200 years ago, the Great Plains—a landscape now commonly referred to as “flyover country”—was one of the biological wonders of the world. Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, John James Audubon and Walt Whitman heaped it with ecstatic praise. Stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Saskatchewan to Texas, the plains were home to 25 million bison, 15 million pronghorn, billions of waterfowl and at least 100,000 grizzly bears (grizzlies were only exiled into mountainous regions in recent human history). Mountain lions and wolf packs hunted through endless seas of five-foot-tall grass, pursuing innumerable elk, bighorn sheep, mule deer, coyotes, black-footed ferrets and prairie dogs. Environmental historian Dan Flores refers to this overwhelming show of biodiversity as the “American Serengeti.”

Today, that original grandeur is hard to grasp. The Great Plains were once North America’s largest continuous ecosystem, covering some 170 million acres—a quarter of the continent—yet only one percent of the native prairie remains. What’s left is scattered, fragmented by fences and converted to agricultural land. That’s one of the difficulties of preserving it: the prairie’s uniqueness lies in its unbroken immensity, a less obvious quality than the dense, dramatic topography of most national parks.

Yet Whitman wrote that the prairies and plains, while less stunning than Yellowstone or Yosemite, “last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest and make North America’s characteristic landscape.” Lewis described the plains around North Dakota’s Little Muddy River as “void of timber or underbrush, exposing to the first glance of the spectator immence herds of buffaloe, elk, deer, and antelopes feeding in one common and boundless pasture.”

These scenes are largely gone. But in northeastern Montana, a few huge stretches of virgin temperate grasslands remain. Much is protected within the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, but the rest is a checkerboard of public and private land—and this is what the American Prairie Reserve (APR) is trying to save.

The Montana-based nonprofit has spent the past two decades acquiring private ranches in an attempt to create an uninterrupted, 3.2 million-acre chunk of protected public land. If they succeed, the resulting nature reserve would be largest in the continental United States—one million acres larger than Yellowstone—and would restore critical habitat and wildlife populations on a scale not seen since the 1800s.

But not everyone in northeastern Montana supports APR’s vision. Many residents depend on the same agricultural practices that led to the prairie’s initial demise and are wary of an “outside” organization buying land and damaging the area’s multi-generational farming economy. And though the APR has no intention (nor legal standing) to do so, conflicts around reintroducing native predators such as grizzlies or wolves have spread from other parts of the state, further increasing tensions.

There is one force, however, with the potential to drive both conservation and the local economy. Outdoor recreation is already one of the state’s largest industries, and the APR could make for a truly unique outdoor destination. It’s this potential that brought me and three friends to Winifred, Montana in late June, prepped for a seven-day, human-powered bikepacking trip. The 359-mile route encircles the entirety of the massive conservation project, passes through seven APR units and traverses some of the final remains of North America’s “characteristic” landscape.