“Dad taught us to leave the world better than how we found it. He also taught us that love is an action verb,” says Paula Roos. “He lived that on a daily basis.”
Paula and her sisters, Kathie Roos, Shomai Meister, and Lee Crouse, spent their early childhoods in the woods and waters of the scenic Blackfoot Valley. Their dad, Paul Roos, grew up in Lincoln, returning with his young family to teach math and serve as the principal of Lincoln’s K-12 school. Paul and his wife, Kay, later founded a successful guiding and outfitting company and a cabin rental business. While their parents tended the businesses, the girls spent many long afternoons playing in the nearby Blackfoot River and Spring Creek, climbing trees, catching frogs, and watching wildlife in their big yard.
“Both mom and dad had a tremendous amount of love for nature and a respect for animals, and a belief that they're all part of us,” says Shomai. “We're all in this world together. It's important to not make it worse if you can help it.”
At the end of 2024, the Roos sisters continued their family's legacy of caring for their land and community when they partnered with Five Valleys on a complex, multi-part project that conserved over 300 acres just outside their old hometown.
The first part of the project involved donating a conservation easement on 160 acres of meadows and creek bottoms that the family calls the “Watkins Place,” ensuring that it would not be subdivided but remain open and available to wildlife and agriculture in perpetuity.
The second part of the project involved the outright donation of a 158-acre parcel, located adjacent to the Watkins Place parceland owned by the family’s Snowberry Foundation. The gift of land is the first of its kind in Five Valleys’ history.
“This generous gift will not only protect this remarkable place but also help us preserve important habitat and agricultural lands elsewhere in the region," noted Minette Johnson, Planned Giving Officer for Five Valleys.
The Snowberry parcel, now owned by Five Valleys, will be protected with a conservation easement later this year. Once conserved, Five Valleys will sell the protected property, using the proceeds to advance our conservation work across western Montana. The Watkins Place parcel, like all Five Valleys conservation easements properties, is still in the ownership and management of the private landowner, in this case, the Roos family. Five Valleys will work with them, and any future owners, to ensure that the land remains healthy and intact.
The two projects represent a direct line between the conservation ethic of one generation and the next.
In 2009, Paul Roos and his second wife, Carolyn Laws-Roos, worked with Five Valleys to protect the family’s land around Smith Lake through the Roos Conservation Easement project. That same day, Paul and Carolyn and their friends, Becky Garland and John Kowalski, protected an adjoining parcel that they co-owned with another conservation easement, known as the Sawbuck Easement. The two easements permanently protected over 425 acres of meadowlands and nearly two and a half miles of streams, just west of Lincoln.
“We feel obliged to respect and honor this place,” Paul and Caroyln said at the time. “We have experienced that this wonderful place actually seems to own us rather than the other way around.”
That feeling is very much shared by the sisters today.
Around 2010, Paul and Carolyn bought the Snowberry and Watkins Place parcels, which fit together with their existing Roos and Sawbuck conservation easement properties like a puzzle. Their family spent many happy days in the properties’ meadows and creeks.
Paul and Carolyn had long talked about creating a nonprofit that would support their values. Yet, before they could set their plans in motion, Carolyn was diagnosed with cancer. She passed away in 2015. In 2017, Paul moved forward and founded the Snowberry Foundation, naming himself and his daughters as the foundation’s directors. Paul then gifted the Snowberry parcel to the Snowberry Foundation. In 2019, the family celebrated Paul’s marriage to Bonnie Schauwecker Roos. Sadly, Paul passed away in 2020.
Paul Roos was a Montana community and conservation legend, helping to establish the Big Blackfoot Chapter of Trout Unlimited, the Blackfoot Challenge, the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association, the Blackfoot Pathways Sculpture in the Wild, Five Valleys’ Lincoln Community River Park, and more. In 2020 he was inducted into the Montana Outdoors Hall of Fame. He was a teacher, coach, fishing guide, and successful businessman. But to his daughters, he was just Dad; and the land was the land that he, and they, loved.
After Paul passed away, management of the four properties and the Snowberry Foundation was passed down to his daughters. As they settled his estate, Kathie, Paula, Shomai, and Lee came to the difficult realization that selling their family’s Lincoln area lands and dissolving the Snowberry Foundation made the most sense. But they felt a strong responsibility to protect the land that had so long been an integral part of their family’s lives.
“The decision to protect the land was probably the easiest decision we had throughout the last four years. There was no pushback from any of us because we were so clearly aligned with the vision that Dad and Carolyn had. It feels good,” says Paula.
“We believe we are temporary stewards of the land,” says Kathie. “It was a gift to us, and we wanted to handle that gift appropriately. It was pretty simple in that respect."
Yet, like their gift, the land that the Roos sisters have protected is anything but ordinary. The Watkins and Snowberry properties encompass 318 acres of lush mountain meadows and 130 acres of wetlands fed by over two miles of Stonewall, Liverpool, and Keep Cool Creeks. Incredible and diverse wildflower blooms grace the meadows each spring, and cottonwoods and willows line the creek banks. Located on the front porch of the Scapegoat Wilderness, the properties conserve habitat and create connectivity for large herds of elk and deer, grizzly bears, moose, mountain lions, and many other types of wildlife. Raptors, migratory song, as well as native trout, will benefit from the protection of these lands. The conservation easements will also ensure that the properties can continue to be used for agriculture, as they have been for generations.
“It's very nice to know that the properties will remain for the elk and the coyotes, and that the beavers that Dad was always fighting with will continue to build dams where he didn't want them,” says Shomai. “It's nice to know that that environment is going to continue.”
“There is a reason the upper Blackfoot is renowned nationwide for its natural beauty and shines as a conservation success story,” says Kit Fischer, Five Valleys’ Senior Conservation Project Manager. “For decades, landowners, land trusts, and federal and state agencies have put in an incredible amount of work to ensure this landscape will remain largely undeveloped and provide valuable fish and wildlife habitat. The Roos family’s projects continue that important work.”
At the end of 2024, the sisters dissolved the Snowberry Foundation and distributed its remaining assets to Five Valleys and several Lincoln area organizations, ensuring that Paul’s last charitable act would support the community he loved. The Roos family legacy now protects 744 acres of the irreplicable Blackfoot Valley. For generations to come, Five Valleys will ensure that the land remains an open and vibrant part of the upper Blackfoot Valley.
“I think it's a piece of hope we can hand on to our kids and future generations,” says Lee. “We're not going to be here forever. We have to do what's right now. Hopefully it'll affect the future in a good way.”
We know it will.
To learn more about how you can protect our landscape with a gift of real estate, contact Minette Johnson, Planned Giving Officer at 406-519-5191, minette@fvlt.org, or view our Planned Giving page.
Header photo: Sunset from the Snowberry property courtesy of the Roos family
