In the chill dark of a late November morning, a six-point bull elk stepped onto the highway, into the path of a mid-sized sedan. The impact peeled back the roof of the car and knocked the driver out, with his foot jammed on the accelerator. The dazed passenger grabbed the wheel and managed to shut the car off a mile down the road. Miraculously, neither of the two men were seriously injured. It was a different story for the elk.

This drama played out right next to Jay and Sandy Whitney's Flathead Valley farm, where Jay, Sandy, and Montana highway department biologist Pat Basting were in the final days of trying to secure funds to install a wildlife underpass as part of a road construction project. Highway safety funds weren't available because that stretch of Highway 206 wasn't a documented wildlife hazard, even though crews regularly hauled away road kill. On the day of the wreck, the Whitneys were $15,600 short and ten days away from their deadline to come up with the money. When news of the collision came out in the Daily Inter Lake, Jay and Sandy contacted the paper and offered to tell the rest of the story. Five days after that was published, the money for the wildlife crossing was in hand. Y2Y, American Wildlands, Flathead County Commissioners, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Wildlife Land Trust, Friends of the Wild Swan—thirty groups and individuals in all —put the project over the top.

“It was overwhelming,” says Jay, “the way everybody stepped up to the plate.”

The Whitneys had originally just been thinking of putting in a stock crossing, but when Pat came to assess the location, he recognized the perfect opportunity for a wildlife underpass. The Whitney's farm and surrounding area are part of an important corridor along which wildlife, including the occasional grizzly bear, can move from Glacier National Park and the Swan Range down to the Flathead River. When Pat proposed his idea to the Whitneys, they got on board immediately.

Conservation easements and corridors are something of a tradition for the Whitneys, whose family has been in the Flathead area for about a century. Years earlier they had put an easement on some family property on the north side of the Swan River east of Bigfork, where Jay's father once helped establish a public walking trail. On the farm where the underpass was proposed, the family put 109 acres under conservation easement in 1998, and Jay and Sandy contributed another 80 acres as well as $21,000 of their own money to make the wildlife crossing work.

For Jay and Sandy, who both grew up in rural Montana, protecting the integrity of the landscape simply feels like the right thing to do. They have a strong hope that their action will be part of a domino effect.

“What we've done is kind of a gamble,” says Jay. If others in the area are lured more by money than legacy and stewardship, and the land is “chopped up to grow houses,” it would marginalize what the Whitneys and their supporters have accomplished.

With important wetlands up for sale and the whole north shore of Flathead Lake presently being proposed as a development area, it feels to the Whitneys like the Flathead Valley is under siege. It's a difficult thing for the couple to watch.

“There's a feel for the land when you grow up on it that is very difficult to describe,” says Sandy. “We just hope that some of those areas can be preserved,” she says. “It's going to take somebody bigger than us.”