How Wealthy Interests Are Reshaping America’s Public Lands Under Trump Administrations

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At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property. For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now.”

Wilson has spent his life in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains — their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watching him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.

“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else.”

The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club — an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up.”

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration.

America’s Public Lands at Risk: The Numbers

There are more than 600 million acres of federally owned public lands across America — from iconic national parks and monuments to forests, grasslands and seashores. But now, nearly 90 million of those acres are at risk of some kind of development due to what critics describe as an unprecedented shift in policies under the first and second Trump administrations.

Key Examples of Public Land Changes

• Arizona: A sacred Indigenous site was handed over earlier this year to a copper-mining company.
• Utah: Republican Sen. Mike Lee attached a provision last summer to the federal budget that would have sold up to 3.2 million acres of public land across the West.
• Minnesota: The U.S. Senate voted last month to overturn a 20-year-old mining ban on federal lands, clearing the way for a foreign-owned copper mine.

Montana’s Crazy Mountains: Ground Zero for the Fight

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands — and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings — more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue. The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the