Rob Sisson: Our delegation wears Teddy Roosevelt's conservation mantle best

This year’s elk season opener found me tagging along with Randy Newberg and Ted Roosevelt IV in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains.

Ted, who is beginning his 83rd trip around the sun this year, is the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and the keeper of the family’s conservation mantle. Ted punched his tag just as the sun set behind the Crazies, harvesting a beautiful bull.

While the hunt was exciting, it was the conversations with Ted and Randy about conservation in America that made the day so special.

Thankfully, the conservation ethic espoused by President Roosevelt and championed today by his great-grandson is alive and thriving.

In 2012, a group of Republican members of Congress invited me to Washington, D.C., to ask me to help launch a conservation caucus through ConservAmerica, the non-profit I headed up. I made the rounds of philanthropies to find funding to support a caucus, but ran into one wall after another.

In fact, a program officer at one of the largest foundations told me, “Rob, no foundation is going to fund ConservAmerica because we don’t want Republicans to look good.”

Fast forward to 6 a.m. on the morning of President Trump’s first inauguration, when I was invited to the offices of the National Republican Congressional Conference to field the same request. Fortunately, one of ConservAmerica’s individual donors stepped up to support the effort and the Roosevelt Conservation Caucus was launched.

Montana’s own Sen. Steve Daines was the first co-chair of the caucus. Today, 32 senators and representatives are members of the Caucus, including Montana’s entire delegation.

On Nov. 17, I traveled to D.C. for the Roosevelt Conservation Caucus annual reception where Sen. Tim Sheehy was recognized for his incredible leadership on wildfire and forestry health policy. An exclamation point on the day’s celebration was the release of Rep. Ryan Zinke’s Wildlife Road Crossings Program Reauthorization Act of 2025, which would make permanent the federal government’s support of wildlife crossings.

When I first moved to Montana in 2018, I lived just off US 191 south of Gallatin Gateway. I watched, nearly every day, the Gallatin elk herd cross or try to cross the highway. A study released by the state’s highway department painted the stretch of highway from Cottonwood Road to the canyon as a killing zone for wildlife.

Local elected officials just shrugged. If you’ve ever seen the aftermath of an elk-vehicle collision, you know human lives are at risk. Thankfully, Rep. Zinke is a serious legislator and conservationist and is addressing it at the federal level.

With his recently introduced Greater Yellowstone Recreation Enhancement and Tourism Act, the wildlife crossing legislation, and several other pro-conservation bills in the works, conservation has no greater warrior than Ryan Zinke.

Wednesday morning, before flying home, I attended Montana Coffee, hosted by our federal delegation.

Sen. Daines showed me photos of his family’s fall hunting outings, while he stressed the importance of renewing the Great America Outdoors Act.

Rep. Troy Downing regaled me with a story about a recent pheasant hunt. Rep. Zinke talked about how excited he was to return home for Thanksgiving to go elk hunting.

These weren’t perfunctory conversations — these men genuinely love the great outdoors, live and breathe conservation, and deeply understand what it means to Montanans.

No other person in Congress — Democrat or Republican — wears the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt better than our delegation.