Conservation Easements in Park County, Montana

A long, active track record: 21 easements, 20,000+ acres, since 1995

Since 1995, the Gallatin Valley Land Trust (GVLT) has partnered with willing landowners in Park County to complete 21 conservation easements, permanently protecting more than 20,000 acres of working farms and ranches, critical wildlife habitat, and scenic open land. This is not a one-time grant program or a single large deal -- it's a sustained, decades-long pattern of individual landowners voluntarily placing permanent restrictions on their own land, typically in exchange for a tax benefit and the certainty that the land won't be subdivided or developed after they're gone. For a buyer, that history means a meaningful share of Park County's ranch and agricultural land -- particularly in the highest-scenic-value areas -- already carries one of these easements, recorded against the property's title, regardless of who owns it next.

Two current programs are still assembling new easements today

GVLT currently leads the Upper Yellowstone Watershed Conservation Partnership, a project centered in southern Park County and focused primarily on Paradise Valley, aimed at protecting wildlife migration corridors, historic agricultural land, and water quality along the Upper Yellowstone River. A related, newer initiative, Northern Yellowstone Open Lands, launched by GVLT in 2022, works at a landscape scale to conserve agricultural land and migration corridors across the same general area. Both programs are active as of this review: in April 2026, GVLT announced a new easement permanently protecting 437 acres of the Nickelson family's ranch in Paradise Valley's Mill Creek drainage through the Northern Yellowstone Open Lands program -- a concrete, recent example of the pattern continuing rather than a historical artifact.

That momentum has hit a real, documented setback, though. In the final months of the Biden administration, GVLT received a $25 million federal funding commitment intended to build on the program's success; as of mid-2026, the federal government informed GVLT that this funding had been rescinded. For a landowner considering placing a new easement, or a buyer evaluating land whose owner has discussed doing so, this means the federal funding landscape supporting new easement acquisitions in the county is currently less certain than it was as recently as early 2025 -- ask GVLT directly about current funding availability and timeline for any new easement under discussion rather than assuming past funding levels still apply.

What an existing or prospective easement means for a buyer

A conservation easement is a permanent, recorded restriction that runs with the land -- it binds every future owner, not just the person who granted it, and it does not expire when the property changes hands. Buying land already under a GVLT- or NRCS-held easement means the land stays in private ownership and on the local tax rolls, but the specific rights an easement restricts (often the ability to subdivide, to build beyond an agreed building envelope, or to convert agricultural land to other uses) are fixed by the actual recorded easement document, not by this page's general description. Before buying land that may carry an easement -- or land whose value depends partly on adjacency to conserved open space -- ask the seller for the recorded easement deed, contact GVLT directly to confirm the easement's exact terms and monitoring requirements, and don't assume a neighboring property's easement terms apply to the parcel you're considering.