Meet Gates Watson

Growing up in western Pennsylvania, Gates Watson spent his childhood outdoors. Hunting, fishing, skiing and biking were his favorite things to do—and fortunately for him, he found a way to turn his love for life outdoors into a career at The Conservation Fund.

After graduating with a business degree from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Watson started a youth adventure program for inner city kids. He spent the next seven years in Pittsburgh before accepting a position in the Fund’s Montana office. In 2001, he packed up and moved across country, where he dove into conservation work and adapted quickly to the new environment. “Montana is unique in that it’s so large, every corner has its own ecosystem,” he explains. “You find special connections with different parts of the state.”

Watson’s first few years in Montana were consumed with business development—finding partners and places that needed the Fund’s help. A big part of his job involves building on relationships with our partners, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and individual landowners.

Watson learned about the conservation needs of private landowners in the Rocky Mountain Front during a presentation by some of the Fund’s partners in 2007. Fifth- generation ranch families were struggling to keep the land they’d lived and worked on their entire lives. If they lost this land, that could also mean the loss of critical wildlife habitat in an area rich with biological diversity—including the last place where grizzly bears roam freely between the mountains and the plains.

Watson proposed that the Fund work alongside The Nature Conservancy and the USFWS to help conserve land in the Rocky Mountain Front, and they the Fund's help. Since then, Watson has worked with his team to gather resources towards protecting 220,000 acres along the Front.

In addition to saving land in the Rocky Mountain Front, Watson's other projects include conservation along the Bull and Flathead rivers and the Meeteetse Spires Area of Critical Environmental Concern in the Beartooth Mountains. Read about the Fund's work in Montana here. “We can really be proud of what we do,” he says. “ It’s extremely rewarding work.”

Photo courtesy Gates Watson