Yeats family places acreage east of river under easement

A key parcel of farmland just east of the Flathead River has been placed under a conservation easement with the Flathead Land Trust.

“I wanted to protect my land so it wouldn’t be subdivided,” landowner Luci Yeats said last week. “Kind of put my money where my mouth is.”

Yeats and her late husband, Dave, planned on placing the land into an easement, as development pressure east of the river mounted. The land is farmland and woods on 76.5 acres. It often hosts an elk herd in the winter months.

Four generations of the Loeffler and Rogers families have stewarded the land that is part of a larger property farmed by the family since the early 1900s. Luci and her two sisters are now caretakers of the family land that continues to produce vegetables and hay and support cattle in the shadow of Columbia Mountain. 

Yeats’s dad, Ted Rogers, was born here in 1910. Her mother Lulu Loeffler’s family dates back to 1901.

The property helps protect an important wildlife travel corridor that connects millions of acres of protected lands including the Bad Rock Canyon Wildlife Management Area, Flathead National Forest, Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, Glacier National Park and a 14,000-acre network of conserved lands along 50 miles of the Flathead River and north shore of Flathead Lake, noted Laura Katzman of the Flathead Land Trust.

The property is in a strategic location on a natural topographic feature that provides a natural travel corridor for wildlife traveling downstream past an area of intense land development near and including the City of Columbia Falls. The property is at the base of an upland bench where natural springs flow out of the steep hillside and riparian forest and wetlands provide foraging opportunities and security for wildlife. The diversity of habitats on the property are used by grizzly bear, black bear, mountain lion, coyote, fox, elk, white-tailed deer, porcupine, and at least 75 species of birds. The conservation easement will conserve the important bird and wildlife habitat and the family’s legacy in perpetuity, the Land Trust noted.

Yeats said her son, Scott, is returning home from Alaska with his family in the coming weeks. He has his own business and a master’s degree in GIS.

The family is looking toward the future and stewardship of the property. In 2021 they planted more than 400 saplings on one 5-acre plot that Ted Rogers had clearcut to make into a pasture in the 1950s.

Today the trees are doing well. The acreage includes a free-running spring and a small wetland that hosts waterfowl and numerous species of songbirds.