FIELD NOTES / Boulder, Wyoming
Room to Keep Moving
A permanent easement near Boulder protects a narrow pronghorn passage, showing how a modest piece of working land can hold significance beyond its boundaries.
A landscape can look expansive and still leave wildlife little room to move. Near Boulder in western Wyoming, a narrow passage on Wild Horse Ranch carries a concentrated flow of migrating pronghorn. Protecting that small opening means safeguarding something larger than its acreage: the ability of animals to continue through a landscape where the continuity of open ground matters as much as its extent.
In an October 26, 2026, announcement, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department reported that the Pronghorn Fund had helped secure a permanent conservation easement covering 233 acres at the ranch. The protected ground lies within the newly designated Sublette Antelope Migration Corridor. The department described the easement as recently secured and referenced an earlier announcement that month; October 26 was the report’s publication date, not a specified closing date.
The Looney family worked with the Jackson Hole Land Trust’s Green River Valley Program and funding partners to protect the property. Their voluntary agreement keeps the agricultural land together and guards against future subdivision and the fragmentation of wildlife habitat. Here, conservation does not require imagining a landscape emptied of human work. It makes room for that work and for the passage of wild animals.
Established in 2024, the Pronghorn Fund supports habitat restoration, migration protection and research. This easement gives those broad purposes a particular place on the map. There is a quiet beauty in protection that leaves no grand structure to admire. Its achievement is continuity: land remaining whole, a narrow route remaining available. For this corner of western Wyoming, that is a lasting investment in the freedom to move.
Go to the source
An original AI-written summary of the sources above. The artwork is an interpretation, not a photograph of the reported event. Have a correction? Tell Lee.
Explore the Past Collection