Jim Stone works hard on his Rolling Stone Ranch every day. But while tending to the day-to-day details of maintaining a 2,800-acre spread and 200 head of cattle, the 43-year-old Ovando rancher takes a long-term view of the future, both of his ranch and of the entire Blackfoot Valley.

"I'm thinking 80 years, to where maybe my son can have something better," he said.

After getting more and more interested in conservation efforts throughout the 1980s, Stone and several other Blackfoot-area landowners in 1993 formed the Blackfoot Challenge, a group dedicated to protecting the natural resources and rural lifestyle of the 1.5 million-acre Blackfoot Watershed through education and land management programs.

"It's about ridgetop to ridgetop management, and not just the Blackfoot River," he said. "Weeds, wildlife, farm practices, they all figure into it. There's a reason this place doesn't look like the Bitterroot or the Flathead or the Gallatin."

He noted that while protecting the river is important in its own right, it can also be a measure of how landowners are taking care of their own acreage -- which may not even adjoin the Blackfoot.

"If you've got healthy fisheries, you've done good riparian management and you can use that as a guage of how you're doing as a land manager," he said.

Today, Challenge membership includes private landowners, corporate landowners like Plum Creek, and public land managers from the Forest Service and BLM. Stone, the chairman of the Challenge, recently received a Conservation Leadership Award from the Nature Conservancy for his efforts.

Stone says credit for the award could go to dozens of people who have worked together to make the Blackfoot Challenge successful.

"We have 350,000 acres of private land in Powell County in individual weed management areas," he said. "Ten years ago, we would have looked at that idea and said there's no way that can happen."

In 2002, the Challenge embarked on its most ambitious project: buying and reselling (with conservation easements) thousands of acres of Plum Creek Timber land. The Nature Conservancy is temporarily buying the land according to a community-supported plan developed by the Blackfoot Challenge leadership.

Sharing the sacrifice during the last five years of drought, with various landowners agreeing to each use a little less water rather than cut someone off altogether, is another signal of the cooperation engendered by the Challenge, Stone said.

"It's these relationships that make it work," he said. "It's not easy, and it's not a 100 percent success story. But the end result is thousands of times better than doing nothing at all."

And aside from protecting the Blackfoot Watershed for future generations, Stone said the Challenge has made his own work more rewarding.

"It makes ranching fun," he said. "I can't tell you how many hundreds of people I've met who have changed my life through this. But I'm still a capitalist, and I'm bringing it back to use for the betterment of this ranch."

John Harrington can be reached at 447-4080 or john.harrington@helenair.com.