Zero-degree air burns my lungs on this brilliant winter day. Breathing heavily, I push through knee-deep snow. The woods on MacDonald Pass are beautiful, with stately conifer limbs laced in white robes of snow. I soon spot my prey—not an actual living creature, but the signs of one, gently leading ever deeper into the woods. A set of really big hind feet and little ones in between: the tracks of a snowshoe hare. Smiling, I struggle on, envious of the hare’s effortless movement through the snow. Another twenty yards, another set of tracks, but this time a predator. Then more hare tracks appear, and a squirrel’s exposed food cache. All around me is forest—an important wildlife corridor, saturated by ribbons of animal tracks.

MacDonald Pass, near Helena, MT, lies completely within a lynx conservation area. In early March, these and other lynx tracks were found close to the proposed biathlon construction area. Photo courtesy of Wild Things Unlimited.

Sadly, this one-mile wide forested patch of public lands, situated along the Continental Divide near Helena, Montana, is under threat. Currently there is a proposal to turn the very area I am standing into a parking lot and firing range—a proposed biathlon for the Army National Guard.

In total, the biathlon would impact 1,966 acres, and the firing range complex itself would be built on the area’s largest wetland. This project is being considered because an environmental assessment claimed this area had “limited value as a wildlife linkage area.”

American Wildlands and I have trouble accepting this diagnosis. As I scout the proposed construction area, I find wildlife tracks, especially snowshoe hare tracks, roughly every twenty yards. That’s good news for our target animal, the Canada lynx, which primarily feeds on snowshoe hare. The MacDonald Pass linkage area lies completely within a lynx conservation area, and in early March, we confirmed lynx activity for multiple days in and around the proposed biathlon area.

Because our corridors analysis shows this is an important wildlife linkage connecting secure habitat to the north and south and the environmental assessment lacked hard scientific data, American Wildlands has initiated a winter wildlife study to get a more accurate picture of its wildlife use. The study is graciously funded by the Cinnabar Foundation, and is currently being carried out by Wild Things Unlimited. Thus far this study has found that lynx, moose, bobcat, hares, coyotes, and squirrels are using MacDonald Pass.

Within a few hours, I climb back into my car and escape the biting cold. As I drive to lower elevations, I feel a sense of pride in my organization’s tenacity to question agency decisions, and to demand that good science inform public land management. As AWL continues our push for maintaining habitat connectivity in the MacDonald Pass area, I am hopeful that the next time I visit these woods they will still be the same quiet wildlife corridor that I just experienced.