Mission & Key Programs
Palouse Land Trust works with landowners and communities to conserve the lands we love, now and forever, and to enrich connections to the natural world.
We help permanently conserve the very best of the Palouse and north-central Idaho: open spaces and iconic landscapes, rare ecosystems, working farms and forests, healthy wildlife and fish habitat, and special outdoor places that bring the community together. We do this primarily by working with willing landowners to create voluntary conservation agreements that benefit the landowner and the entire region not just for today, but for generations to come. Additionally, we own a public nature preserve where much of our community programming takes place; a beautiful and sweeping swath of native Palouse Prairie protected as the Dave Skinner Ecological Preserve, and we’ve recently been gifted a stunning 530-acre property that is home to a critical wildlife travel corridor and will feature limited public access in the future.
The Maple K Meyers easement in Whitman County, WA in the spring sunshine. Photo courtesy of Palouse Land Trust.
service area
The Palouse Land Trust service area encompasses a massive 12.2 million acres of forest, farmland, wildlife habitat, and vital watersheds in seven north central Idaho counties and one county in eastern Washington State. My favorite way to describe our service area is as the “knuckle” of Idaho – we serve the area smack dab between the panhandle (index and middle fingers), and everything below it (the back of the hand).
Unique in the Transboundary Rocky Mountains
Our service region sits at a pivotal point between the Idaho Panhandle and the broader interior West, where the Palouse Prairie, Northern Rocky Mountain forests, and canyon grasslands meet. This transition zone creates an unusually rich ecological crossroads, supporting a diversity of plant and wildlife communities that rarely overlap in one place.
The area also lies along the greater Rocky Mountain corridor connecting the Crown of the Continent ecosystem to landscapes farther south, providing habitat linkages that allow wildlife to move across one of North America’s most important conservation networks. Headwaters and tributaries in this region feed the Clearwater and Snake Rivers, making local land stewardship vital to water quality and aquatic habitat throughout the Columbia River Basin. At the same time, the region’s deep loess soils support the globally significant agricultural landscape of the Palouse, creating a place where conservation, working lands, and community identity are deeply intertwined.
Palouse Land Trust staff. Photo courtesy of Palouse Land Trust.
project highlight
“The moment I saw this property, I knew I wanted to protect it and share it with everyone.”
Landowners have the right to prohibit or grant access to our land. Many conservation landowners in the land trust family elect to allow access for educational or research purposes, while many prefer to limit access, both of which are perfect and appropriate. But every so often, a landowner comes along with the express desire to share the land, and open access to anyone and everyone. One such landowner is Trish Hartzell.
Trish chose to permanently protect almost 60-acres of her property, which abuts Idler’s Rest Nature Preserve, about five miles outside of Moscow, Idaho. The protection of land adjacent to the preserve was a huge win for plant, insect and wildlife habitat and travel corridors, but it also presented an amazing opportunity for humans, too: the creation of Moscow Mountain’s first permanently protected public recreational trail — Penstemon Path.
Ribbon cutting of the new Penstemon Path, June 3, 2023. From left to right: Sandra Townsend, President of MAMBA, Trish Hartzell, landowner, Lovina Englund, PLT Executive Director, and Bert Baumgaertner, President of Palouse Road Runners.
The easement and ongoing stewardship of the trail was made possible with partial funding from the Thomas O. Brown Foundation and the Moscow-area outdoor community, including MAMBA (Moscow Area Mountain Biking Association) and Palouse Road Runners and other outdoor enthusiasts. Read more about this project here.
A slightly smoky view from one of the many vantage points.
