Putting aside natural places allows wildlife to increase and then spread out from those
places across the landscape.
And for the Native American Reservation or for other parts of Montana, just to have
that neighboring wellspring of wildlife is pretty incredible.
My name is Jason Gregg, I'm 25 years old, recently finished with school and now I'm
doing fieldwork on the American Prayer Reservation.
Getting out on the prairie?
No, I think I knew that it would be remote and I was ready for that.
Landmark is a collaboration between the American Prayer Reserve and adventurers and scientists
for conservation.
They have crews out here for one to two months usually and hiking at the Sun Prairie, which
is a small part of the American Prayer Reserve.
One of the highlights has been figuring out that I can really walk 10 miles a day every
day a week.
We're really capable of that.
Another has been seeing almost all the corners and boundaries of such a large property, it's
30,000 acres and the transects bring us to almost all the edges and corners.
After a while I was really beginning to understand where I was in such a big landscape and I
don't think I've ever had to puzzle together, piece together such a large landscape before.
The crew members are hiking transects looking at the wildlife and collecting data on what
they see every day.
It's one of the biggest conservation projects in the United States, maybe the world.
I haven't seen anything like this really.
It's great.
There's so many people that actually wants to make a difference and actually wants to
do something and that's really cool.
I feel like now I can say well I helped do something big in my own country and the American
Prairie Reserve is cool because they're trying to create one large area and they're setting
it up so that the ecosystem can take care of itself.
The advantage of being out there for two whole months in terms of photography and film is
that I can kind of wait for stuff to happen which is you need to.
The prairies, it's dynamic but it's not that dynamic.
Things come, things go, things are difficult to capture and by being there for two months
you could wait for it and you could capture those moments when they happened and I think
that was one of the cool things about it.
I think it's kind of the same with life there.
You kind of just got to deal with what comes and it's just the reality of it.
The storms that came through, damn the storms that came through, just epic light shows.
Words can't describe some of the light shows that those storms put on and the speed that
they track across the prairie and it could just be this beautiful calm day and then
the wind picks up a little bit and then you're like we might get a bit of something here.
Then you look across the horizon and there's just storms all around you just tracking across
and the rain starts and it's just epic, it's such a wicked experience.
I got to the prairie and it started to rain for two or three days non-stop and it set
off a cascade of events that really shaped the whole month for the whole crew.
It just started raining and it didn't stop for two days, it just rained and rained and
the creeks filled up, they flooded, they overflowed.
The flood, that was difficult too but you just have to stay busy, you have to have things
that you can do to keep your mind off things when you're stuck in a camper for a while.
Two weeks later the mosquitoes came and it wasn't cold enough, it wasn't cold enough
to kill them off but it wasn't also hot enough to keep them away during the day so we went
through this period of 24 hour mosquitoes at times or they'd be disappeared for three
hours in the morning and then by 9 they're back again and they stayed all day until
we went to bed.
But you know, it was fun to deal with, it was completely new to me and I definitely learned
how to stay calm.
Alright, let's talk about the mosquitoes, the mosquitoes are horrible.
I lost my shit one day, I really lost my shit one day.
I swallowed like four today.
Supposedly the bigger ones in Alaska can bite through all your clothes, that would be worse.
I'm going to remember that it was a challenge but it was also unique and it might have been
a 40 year mosquito plague, just like the 100 year storm that it was.
You get a unique appreciation of that environment and the place that you're in.
So my crew have really seen that we've had a good experience because we've not only
done the work that we're supposed to do, hiked the transects, collected data but we also
have our own projects and ideas and we're kind of pushing those forward as we're doing
the work and we're looking for our next job and we're figuring out what we want to do.
We're finding our place in the environmental movement, that's what I'm doing.
It feels like we're actually doing something with a bigger purpose and that feels good.
It's just so much awesome stuff we can do, I think we should do it.
