The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation was founded in 1984 by four elk hunters in Northwest Montana who realized elk needed a champion.
Prior to the European settlement centuries ago, there were more than 10 million elk across North America. By the early 1900s, only 41,000 remained.
Teddy Roosevelt and other hunters and conservationists acted and implemented highly regulated hunting practices, generated a mechanism to create conservation funding and elk numbers began to grow.
By 1984, there were 550,000 elk but as the human population ballooned and development spread, elk habitat continued to shrink.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation set out to ensure the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage.
In 1987, RMEF purchased the more than 17,000-acre Robb Creek Ranch, thwarting any possibility for the pivotal elk habitat to be divided up into housing tracts, and then conveyed it to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The transaction conserved the landscape, opened it to public access for hunting, fishing and other recreational activities, and catapulted the organization into the big leagues of conservation. This transaction marked the first of what now numbers in the hundreds of land conservation and access projects spearheaded by RMEF.
Ten years later in 1997, another conservation milestone took place 2,000 miles to the east when elk were restored to the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
That restoration and subsequent follow-up efforts led to a thriving herd today numbering more than 10,000 – the largest population east of the Mississippi.
Other RMEF-supported successful elk restoration projects took place in Wisconsin, Tennessee, North Carolina, Missouri, Virginia, West Virginia and Ottawa, Canada. Today, there are wild, free-ranging elk in 28 different states.
With a focus of ensuring the future of elk, other wildlife, their habitat and our hunting heritage, RMEF carries out its conservation work through a handful of key mission programs.
Land conservation and access is about protecting quality elk range, migration corridors, winter range, calving areas and other landscapes critical to elk and other wildlife. And then providing public access to it. Conservation tools include land acquisitions and exchanges, volunteer conservation agreements, access easements and other means.
Habitat Stewardship includes bringing a focus of maintaining and enhancing quality habitat for elk and other wildlife by implementing prescribed burning, forest thinning, noxious weed control, establishing water developments, restoring aspen and other treatments.
Wildlife Management ensures that RMEF engages in wildlife issues of local, regional and national concern and safeguards the scientific integrity of mission programs. Efforts include disease, predator management, elk ecology, population dynamics and supporting research to grow the knowledge base for elk and elk habitat.
Hunting Heritage supports programs that ensure the future of hunting by seeking to increase engagement in it and other outdoor activities.
And being engaged in Advocacy is vitally important to our members and crucial to furthering mission. RMEF works with Congress, federal and state agencies, the judicial system and state legislatures to track and engage on legislations, regulations and litigation.
The heart and soul of RMEF is its volunteers who host banquets and other events across 500 chapters. They, along with our partners, members, donors and staff allowed the organization to put millions of dollars on the ground since its inception – carrying out more than 13,000 projects that conserved and enhanced well over 8 million acres of habitat for the benefit of elk and other wildlife. And the value of that conservation work is greater than one billion dollars.
All that translates into a current elk population numbering more than 1.1 million.
