Late in 2005, Clark Stevens, a partner in the storied Los Angeles firm of RoTo Architects—known for such outlandish design statements as building lap pools from discarded steel tubing—stood overlooking a lava plain on the island of Hawaii. Surveying a vast cattle ranch that soars 4,000 feet from the ocean to peaks covered with sacred Mamane trees, the architect looked like a misplaced nineteenth-century explorer. His white, wide-brimmed fishing hat had flaps hanging down the back of his neck. The skeet belt around his waist was stuffed with sketchbooks, colored pencils, and every scale of topographical map imaginable, along with such modern accoutrements as an oversized digital camera and countless empty water bottles. Reveling in his new role—designing and conserving iconic American landscapes so that they can attract natural habitat and housing alike—the blond, Harvard-trained 43-year-old was oblivious to the outlandish figure he cut. But it had caught the attention of a roaming bull buffalo, and moments later, Stevens was running for his life.
Not all expeditions to discover what Stevens calls "the essential grains of nature" lead to such life-threatening encounters. Indeed, in early 2000, when he started the New West Land Company in Livingston, Montana, to promote his bold ideas for conservation and development, he downplayed his risk-taking personality, along with his years in Los Angeles. (One of Stevens's signature Montana houses was recently put on the market.) "I thought I might get shot if I arrived in Montana and started showing the RoTo portfolio around," he said. Luckily, Stevens—who grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, and spent much of his youth exploring the nearby Manistee National Forest—is blessed with a kinetic, storyteller's personality, a winningly hortatory manner, and a natural ease in the wilderness. It's been key to this cowboy architect's acceptance by ranchers and developers alike in the remote outbacks of Hawaii, Montana, and Wyoming. "What I want to see is not just a revival of nature," Stevens tells them. "I want a place where people know the land and each other well enough to start creating legends again." So far, they seem to be listening.
Seeking an escape from the RoTo office (housed in an old, downtown L.A. brewery), Stevens first came to Montana to fish in the late eighties. "There's no getting him out of the river," remarked Chris Allen, whose Stillwater Development Company is backing one of Stevens's current projects. "If he says he'll cook dinner, don't expect to eat before ten."
Driving around the Madison, Gallatin, and Paradise Valleys of Montana, Stevens came face to face with the rapid suburbanization of the West. It broke his heart. Huge cattle ranches, he says, have been sold off, many by owners looking to avoid estate taxes and pay for their own retirement, and then chopped up into small, predominantly ten-acre lots. New buyers arrived and built houses—often McMansions—but little else. Their private pieces of the West—too small for agriculture, too large for most gardeners—helped produce an increasingly brittle landscape. And with little relationship to the land and its traditions, the new "urban ranchers"—many hailing from Billings and Helena, and from faraway cities like San Francisco and Tokyo—felt isolated. Many, in fact, have now left, leaving blight in their wake.
At the Jackknife Creek Ranch, about 30 minutes southwest of Jackson, Wyoming, Stevens will first restore the historic 210-acre property's natural landmarks: its tall willows and smattering of aspens, and, in particular, its intricate wetlands. "The Jackknife Creek will meander once again," he says of the severely compromised stream that goes through what was once a family cattle ranch. "A good meander and a steady flow is vital for healthy fish habitat," Stevens notes, mindful that nearby are the best counts of rainbow and brown trout in the entire state—a major selling point for the new, conservation-minded breed of owners that Jackknife is designed to attract. "We might even get back some native cutthroat trout," says the avid fly fisherman, whose aesthetic is more A River Runs Through It than Frederick Law Olmsted. Then construction will begin on a cluster of houses and apartments sited close to—and, in some cases, growing out of— existing barns and sheds. These elegant reminders of the past will be sited far enough for each to have its own private view of the ranch's recovered natural beauty, and behind it, the soaring 10,000-foot peaks of the Salt River and Caribou Mountains. "The idea is for everyone to have their own 200-acre view, yet be able to go ask a neighbor for a cup a sugar."
