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Stoney Burk is a typical example of the passions people hold for this land. Burk is an attorney in Choteau, calls himself a conservative, voted for President Bush and pledges, with his voice rising: "I will crawl 200 miles on my belly to save this front.
"I'm not an environmentalist; I've never liked people with long hair sitting in trees and smoking a pipe," he said. "But I would consider anyone who would violate this front my enemy. I guarantee you that if this thing goes through, there will be a lot of us lying down in front of bulldozers and not moving."
But this place, where the tabletop Great Plains crash headlong into the shins of the towering Rockies, contains deposits of natural gas that the industry and the Bush administration say are a key to securing the nation's energy independence.
The front forms the eastern edge of a much larger geologic formation: the Montana Thrust Belt, which underlies the western third of the state. How much gas is here is a matter of debate. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the area could contain as much as one-fourth of the nation's annual natural-gas consumption.
For Flora and other opponents of drilling, the question is why -- in an area as vast as the thrust belt -- must the industry drill in the least disturbed place?
"Why are they hellbent on drilling here with all the problems, restrictions and lack of public support?" Flora asked, shaking her head. "They think they can stick a pin in the vast landscape and find the one spot where there is gas? It's hard to understand."
Industry officials say they don't have a lot of alternatives to exploring the front. They say more than 90% of the thrust belt is closed to drilling.
Nonetheless, Flora hopes to entice them to go elsewhere. She is advocating a federal buyout of oil and gas leases, or an exchange in which leases would be traded for the right to explore elsewhere on federal land. It has been a hard sell.
Despite the support of Montana's Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, buyout legislation has gone nowhere.
As the supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in 1997, Flora decided that maintaining the primitive grandeur of the forest and its free-ranging wildlife had more value than the oil and gas the land might contain. She said no new energy leases could be granted for at least 10 years on about 350,000 acres of the 1.8-million-acre national forest, and she allowed only restricted exploration elsewhere in the forest.
It was an act of bureaucratic bravado that made her as many enemies as friends. There were, after all, many millions of protected acres in wilderness areas and nearby Glacier National Park. And who was she, the critics asked, to extend that protection -- a determination that is solely the province of Congress?
Flora responded that her moratorium allowed many activities, such as logging and grazing, that are prohibited in wilderness. But she also argued that the land covered by her moratorium was no less worthy of protection than the adjacent wilderness.
"If they can get in here," Flora said, her voice rising over the roar of the plane's engine, "they can get in anywhere."
Flora's presence raises the profile of the debate, but also its temperature. The former bureaucrat so enrages some Montanans that she once required a police escort to speak at a public forum addressing the need for civility in public discussion.
Flora, 48, has made a career of invalidating stereotypes. In the Forest Service's lumberjack culture, she was a singular presence. Flora's appearance suggested Earth Mother, but her management style screamed Type A.
One minute she draws on spiritual imagery to express her communion with these mountains; in another she displays a forensic command of the region's history, science and natural attributes
Critics were scornful of the language she used in her written decision to close the front to oil and gas. Preserving "a sense of place" was reason enough to bar development, Flora wrote.
"It was a real stop-the-show kind of decision," said Abercrombie of the Montana Petroleum Assn., which represents a $300-million-a-year industry in the state. "That touchy-feely kind of thing fits her philosophy. There's no way to work around somebody's 'sense of place' or to know what that means."
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