From the back of a bush plane at Mission Field, the Crazy Mountains were only 20 miles in the distance, close enough for me to see late-afternoon shadows drift across their avalanche-scarred ridges. Here at the airport serving Livingston, Montana, at the northern gateway to Yellowstone National Park, the state’s decadelong economic boom was in full effect. Men in cowboy hats, carrying briefcases, crossed the tarmac. Horns blared in the distance. Then came the other sound I’d come to associate with a state once so empty that, until recently, it had only one representative in the U.S. House: hammering. Human activity was everywhere, yet those mountains on the horizon, the mystical Crazies, seemed frozen in time, artifacts of an unpeopled world placed under glass.

That was where we were headed. As our plane approached, the Crazies rose up like a medieval fortress, sheer walled and glacier tipped, toward the 11,214-foot Crazy Peak. “Any other mountain range in Montana near a large population center, you’d see some kind of human activity,” said my pilot. Around us were dozens of peaks, not a single one with a cell tower atop it or a road zigzagging nearby. There were no transmission lines or high-speed quads leading to a cafeteria in the sky. As the pilot dropped us into a valley, I saw our first sign of civilization, an airstrip. “That’s the Marlboro Ranch,” he said, circling so I could get a better look at the sprawling property. The ranch had at one time belonged to Philip Morris, which used it as a destination in its rewards program for longtime smokers.

For an hour, we explored the range’s upper reaches, darting through canyons and ridgelines cut like broken glass. This was a rare privilege since the Crazies are not just physically daunting; they are largely off-limits to the public and fast on their way to becoming a private mountain range for the wealthy. A range where the public is increasingly unable to hike, hunt, or fish, even though nearly half the spectacular terrain belongs to them as part of the Custer Gallatin National Forest.

It’s an alarming example of a growing trend. The United States is privatizing its natural wonders from Southern California beaches to Rocky Mountain streams. Investors buy up a valley or mountain, fence it off, shoo away the public, and charge rates only the wealthy can afford. Nowhere is this more in evidence than Montana, where former livestock ranches across the state have been converted into fishing and hunting clubs. Montana has been luxurified, from the skyrocketing cost of paying outfitters to shoot a bull elk to the carving of the state into recreational ranches the size of major national parks. (Rupert Murdoch’s Matador Ranch and Cattle, the largest at 380,000 acres, falls somewhere in size between Grand Teton and Sequoia.) The Montana recreation and real-estate boom has helped grow the population by 18 percent, a rate twice the national average, lessening its dependence on traditional forms of resource extraction. But this has also brought to light uncomfortable realities. Montana now has more Realtors per capita than most states. It has become a national leader in golf, not quite the sport they play in A River Runs Through It. And voters across the state are saying their quality of life is decaying.

Public land is a top issue in Montana. A sampling of recent headlines: “Montanans say quality of life getting worse, but support for public lands still strong” and “Survey: 3 in 5 believe quality of life has fallen; public lands support high.” As outdoors connoisseurs, Montanans care intensely about what their land is used for. A great deal of public land in the West essentially exists on paper only, cut off in clever ways by landowners — perhaps none more clever than the exclusive group of billionaires leading the effort to seize the most valuable parts of the Crazies.

This fall, Montana television screens have been saturated with campaign ads featuring squinty old men glowering at the camera and vowing to safeguard the state’s patrimony. The most aggressive came from Tim Sheehy, a barrel-chested former Navy SEAL running for senator. In reality, Republicans in the state, led by Sheehy’s mentor, Senator Steve Daines, have a record of eroding protections for public lands. Sheehy’s Democratic rival, the incumbent Jon Tester, managed to win reelection in 2018 despite Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in the state by more than 20 points two years earlier. Tester has been a voice for transparency and accountability on public-land issues, but public-access groups say even he has been relatively mute about the Crazies, frustrating some supporters. He is now trailing Sheehy by eight points, according to the latest New York Times–Siena poll, in a race that might well swing control of the U.S. Senate to the GOP.

Curiously, the perpetrators of privatization are never named in these ads, leaving the viewer to wonder: Are they speculators? D.C. bureaucrats? Who is after Montana’s land, and why, in an election year when voters are demanding protection from them, won’t anyone say who they are?

In midtown Manhattan, across Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower, is a conference room with an image of the Crazy Mountains etched on a glass wall. The office belongs to Riverstone Holdings, an asset-management firm that has been a major player in fracking with shale assets in the U.S., Canada, and Argentina. The firm’s co-founder is David Leuschen, a 73-year-old Montanan who in the 1990s began buying ranches in his home state, assembling horizon-spanning sections of landscape the way some developers collect city lots. On one, he reportedly built a cattle operation replete with 2,000 cows, its corrals designed by the animal-rights activist Temple Grandin. According to The Crazies, a forthcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Gamerman, Leuschen has a mirrored trailer at the ranch where he artificially inseminates cows himself using the world’s most expensive bull semen. Gamerman said Leuschen enjoys “telling people that he had fathered more than 3,000 babies this way” while blasting “Love Shack,” by the B-52’s, on the trailer’s sound system. (Leuschen denied Gamerman’s claims.)

In 2012, Leuschen purchased what may be the crown jewel of his empire. At the time, Montana ranches were selling at 60 percent below market value thanks to the Great Recession. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as fourth- and fifth-generation Montanans let go of properties that had been created when the West was swiped from Native Americans. In the Crazies, the dominant landowner, besides the federal government, was the Van Cleve family, which owned a dude ranch called the Lazy K Bar Ranch that encompassed several high-altitude peaks, including Crazy Peak. Leuschen saw the listing and bought all 11,000 acres — more than half the size of Manhattan.

Leuschen also has a stake in the investment........

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