Badlands and barbed wire: Conservationists re-wild Montana's prairies and pronghorn

It might surprise some to learn that Montana’s largest National Wildlife Refuge doesn’t contain a single mountain. Instead all 1.1 million acres of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, or CMR, consists of sweeping prairie encompassing the massive Fort Peck Reservoir and rugged, impassable badlands that spin the land into a labyrinth of gumbo hills and plummeting draws. 

But for all its rugged wildness, the refuge has not always stood as a pristine example of prairie grasslands and more than a century of western expansion, homesteading and ranching has left behind barbed-wire remnants of when the refuge was parceled out as ranchland years ago. But one conservation group, known as Keep It Public, alongside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field offices that oversee the refuge are hoping to remove those fence lines in a decade’s long effort to restore the refuge’s prairie to its untamed glory. 

On this episode, A.J Etherington, city editor of the Billings Gazette newspaper, talks about his time spent in the CMR reporting on work done by conservationists.

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Montana Untamed, hosted by Thom Bridge, covers the state's rugged landscape from hook and bullet to policy and science.