DARBY — Les Durland's great grandfather Frank Cook started homesteading on the west fork of the Bitterroot in the late 1800s.
"In 1892, he traded ranches with a gentleman named George Sherrill. That's how we ended up on the property we're on now," Durland said.
In the early 1900s, the big ditch was put in on the Durland's property. Seasonally, it fills up with water from Lake Como and helps irrigate the Bitterroot Valley going North.
So, not only is the land home to cattle and a house used in the TV show Yellowstone, but more importantly, it's part of a system that helps the community.
"It goes back to something my father had told me as a kid. Farmers take from the ground and put something back, and this is our way of putting something back in perpetuity," Durland said.
Durland has fond memories from being on the ranch which is why he decided to keep it from being subdivided.
"When I was a kid growing up, and my memories back in the 1950s, they had chickens, they had pigs, they had dairy cows, they had cattle they had a huge garden. It's probably 0.5 acre in size, and they grew everything," Durland explained.
Now, the Durland family's 183 acres, called the Lazy KD Ranch, are in a conservation easement.
"My father said to me, I want you to hang on to the ranch as long as I'm alive. After I die, I don't care what you do. Well, Dad, it's always gonna be a ranch," Durland said.
The Durlands are like many in Darby choosing the conservation easement route.
"We're in an easement. The people to the west of us are in an easement. Then you have the national forest to the south of us are two easements, so you've got a whole protected area around there that will always be open land," Durland detailed.
"It is part of 4,000 acres of conserved and in progress conservation easements in the Darby-Como Wildlife corridor area," Bitterroot Land Trust Executive Director Lauren Rennaker added.
The Ravalli County Open Lands Bond helped make easements a reality in the Bitterroot Valley.
"We're fortunate here in Ravalli County to have a Ravalli County open lands bond program. This project was funded in part by that program that was approved by 71% of our valley," Rennaker said.
With help from the Bitterroot Land Trust traditional character of the area will remain.
"Wildlife, water resources, working lands, means so much to who we are as a community here in the Bitterroot and moving forward, making sure that this remains for the next generation," Rennaker said.
Many across Western Montana are also opting to make those legally binding agreements to limit development on properties forever.
In the Bitterroot Valley, the Bitterroot Land Trust alone has conserved more than 15,200 acres through 70 projects.
Within the Missoula area, the open space bond has allowed for 36 projects comprising more than 17,000 acres of county and joint city-county endeavors.
Five Valleys Land Trust has protected more than 97,000 acres in many counties including Mineral, Powell, Lake, Granite among others.
Up in Flathead and Lincoln Counties, the Flathead Land Trust has 88 conservation easements.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that there are around 2,600 existing conservation easements in Montana conserving 3 million acres of farm and ranch lands.
That makes Montana the top conservation easement state in the nation.
