A group of billionaires is maneuvering to secure acres of prime public land in Montana

From the back of a bush plane at Mission Field, the Crazy Mountains were only 20 miles in the distance, close enough for me to see late-afternoon shadows drift across their avalanche-scarred ridges. Here at the airport serving Livingston, Montana, at the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park, the state’s decadelong economic boom was in full effect. Men in cowboy hats, carrying briefcases, crossed the tarmac. Horns blared in the distance. Then came the other sound I’d come to associate with a state once so empty that, until recently, it had only one representative in the U.S. House: hammering. Human activity was everywhere, yet those mountains on the horizon, the mystical Crazies, seemed frozen in time, artifacts of an unpeopled world placed under glass.

That was where we were headed. As our plane approached, the Crazies rose up like a medieval fortress, sheer walled and glacier tipped, toward the 11,214-foot Crazy Peak. “Any other mountain range in Montana near a large population center, you’d see some kind of human activity,” said my pilot. Around us were dozens of peaks, not a single one with a cell tower atop it or a road zigzagging nearby. There were no transmission lines or high-speed quads leading to a cafeteria in the sky. As the pilot dropped us into a valley, I saw our first sign of civilization, an airstrip. “That’s the Marlboro Ranch,” he said, circling so I could get a better look at the sprawling property. The ranch had at one time belonged to Philip Morris, which used it as a destination in its rewards program for longtime smokers.

For an hour, we explored the range’s upper reaches, darting through canyons and ridgelines cut like broken glass. This was a rare privilege since the Crazies are not just physically daunting; they are largely off-limits to the public and fast on their way to becoming a private mountain range for the wealthy. A range where the public is increasingly unable to hike, hunt, or fish, even though nearly half the spectacular terrain belongs to them as part of the Custer Gallatin National Forest.