Alex and Avalanche - Photo: Deb Love
As promised, above is a final photo of Alex Love that we considered for Jason D.B. Kaufmann’s upcoming piece in Land&People magazine about the Montana Legacy Project. The photo was taken at Lindbergh Lake* in the Swan Valley during a celebratory outing to honor and reward the children of three sets of parents who had been away from home for many hours working on one of the largest conservation projects in U.S. history.
The photo, taken by Alex’s mother, Deb Love, shows Alex with Avalanche, the Loves’ puppy. Deb is TPL’s Northern Rockies director; and her husband, Eric, was TPL’s lead project manager on the Montana Legacy Project. Deb’s daughter, Sabine, eight, was also at the gathering.
The woman in red in the background of the photo is Flo Williams, wife of Jamie Williams, director of the Northern Rockies Initiative for The Nature Conservancy, which partnered with TPL on the Montana Legacy Project. Eric and Jamie were all but joined at the hip during the project. The Williamses were at Lindbergh lake with their kids, Ben and Annabelle.
The third family on the Lindbergh Lake outing was Swan Valley residents Tom and Melanie Parker with their children, Kyra and John. The couple founded Northwest Connections, a community-based conservation organization. And Melanie helped create the Swan Valley Coordinating Committee, which brings together stakeholders to create a shared vision of the valley’s future. With the Loves, the Williamses, and dozens of other valley residents and conservationists, the Parkers devoted many hours to accomplishing an ambitious conservation goal.
Tom and Melanie Parker with their children, Kyra and John - Photo: Flo Williams
One of the constant struggles in telling conservation stories is to avoid getting bogged down in awestruck descriptions of pretty landscapes and mind-numbing project details—to instead try to capture some of the excitement and satisfaction involved in doing the work.
This is a particular danger when telling the story of a project as large (310,000 acres) and as expensive ($500 million) as the Montana Legacy Project. That’s a breathtaking amount of two kinds of green—enough to overshadow some of the human stories involved.
We’ve tried not to let that happen in this case.
Links for you:
- Get a complimentary copy of Land&People.
- Read Land&People digital—the last few issues online in full facsimile of the printed version.
- Read more about TPL’s work in Montana.
- Visit TPL’s brand-new website.
Enjoy.
*About Lindbergh Lake
Charles Lindbergh at Lindbergh Lake, 1927 - Photo: courtesy Montana Historical Society, Helena
You will probably not be surprised to learn that Lindbergh Lake is named after pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, who spotted the lake from the air in 1927. Perhaps weary of celebrity aeronautics, he asked folks in Butte, Montana, how he could find the lake, which he had marked on a map.
Lindbergh spent two weeks camping along the shore of what was then named Elbow Lake. A boulder there still bears a worn, hand-carved inscription that reads, “Lindy ’27.”
How do I know all this? Because, back in the 1990s, Lindbergh Lake was the first property TPL helped to protect in the Swan Valley, kicking off an effort that would culminate in the Montana Legacy Project more than a decade later. Recalling this, I looked up the details in an old issue of Land&People. Handy magazine.
