Yellowstone has been a public trust since 1872, and this week it acquired a private endowment to match the scale of the place. The National Park Service, its nonprofit partner Yellowstone Forever, and Tallgrass, an energy infrastructure company owned by Blackstone Infrastructure, announced a $105 million Conservation and Stewardship Fund on October 19, a permanent source of money for the long term care of the world’s first national park. In their announcement, the partners describe it as the largest single private gift in National Park Service history.
The fund is built to outlast its announcement. Rather than paying for one project, it will direct money toward three standing needs: conservation and research, infrastructure that improves access and the visitor experience, and programs that bring Wyoming students and community members into the park. The third priority has a name of its own, the Tallgrass WYld Yellowstone Initiative, after a company that has operated in Wyoming for more than a decade. One limit is written into the arrangement in plain language: the Park Service keeps full authority over management decisions, and every project the fund pays for must fit park priorities and law.
What the signers said
“This is a transformational investment in Yellowstone National Park,” said Lisa Diekmann, president and chief executive of Yellowstone Forever, the park’s official nonprofit partner. “It gives us the ability to meet urgent needs today while building enduring support for the research, education, stewardship and visitor infrastructure that will protect this park for generations to come.”
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum reached back to the park’s origin story. “More than 120 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of Yellowstone’s iconic gateway, enshrining the promise that our National Parks exist for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people,” Burgum said. Sean Klimczak, Blackstone’s global head of infrastructure, said the firm feels “a profound sense of responsibility to protect it for future generations.” Crystal Heter, president and chief executive of Tallgrass, tied the gift to the company’s home ground: “Wyoming has been part of the Tallgrass story from the beginning.”
Preservation at landscape scale
The park the fund serves covers more than 2.2 million acres across Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Tallgrass, for its part, runs more than 10,000 miles of pipelines across 14 states, backed by Blackstone with CPP Investments, GIC and USS. A gift of this size from an energy company will draw two readings, gratitude for the money and questions about the motive, and the structure answers part of the question on its own: the donor does not manage the park, and the fund’s third of the bargain is access, measured in Wyoming schoolchildren seeing Old Faithful with their own eyes. The full announcement is at the National Park Service and via Business Wire.
Yellowstone was preserved by an act of Congress before anyone alive had seen most of it. A century and a half later, its upkeep has a second engine, and the test of the fund will be unglamorous: research funded, trails and facilities repaired, buses of Wyoming students arriving at the gate.
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