I was taken aback by the landscape almost immediately, but not for the reasons I’d imagined. I knew I was headed into grasslands rather than the Rockies, so I mistakenly assumed the terrain would look no different than parts of western Nebraska I’d known growing up. Instead I discovered what I’ve since been referring to as the “Sandhills on steroids.”

In many ways the area is quite similar to western Nebraska, but the scale is turned up to 200. At times on my drive out, looking out the car window gave me the same feeling as when you stand right underneath a skyscraper and look straight up. I’m sure many native Montanans would roll their eyes at one more outsider sermonizing about “big country,” but it is genuinely striking for someone who’s spent the vast majority of their life in the checkerboard Midwest.

Once I got off the highway and actually dove into the countryside in search of sharptail, I was immediately transported back in time. We saw tipi rings still branded into the dirt. Tar paper shacks and dugouts dotted the sidehills and gulleys. I thought of what this grassland had meant to both natives and white settlers, as well as to the game they pursued through this landscape for centuries.

I imagined how intimidating it must’ve been to lay eyes on this country for the first time out the back of a wagon in about 1870. And then I thought much, much further back.

There’s a fairly longstanding hypothesis that human evolution is directly linked to the expansion of grassland savannah in east Africa. It’s much debated and often criticized, but I couldn’t help think about it as we hunted.

Whatever the reality is, it’s fair to say we became who we are at least in some small part thanks to grasslands — however distant they may have been from eastern Montana. Grasslands are deep in our bones, intertwined in both the history of our country and the history of our species. To walk among them in the American west and feel that history is a tremendous gift.

We lose 2.6 million acres of grasslands in the U.S. every year, and over 30 percent of Eastern Montana’s grasslands have been broken or altered. It is the most imperiled landscape on the planet, which is sometimes hard to comprehend.

I was certainly not ignorant of this before I came to Montana. This habitat is disappearing everywhere. But the kind of untamed energy and mystery present in Montana’s grasslands creates an incredibly powerful case for conservation. The pursuit of sharptail is completely irrelevant — these grasslands are a part of us, and we need to make damn sure they continue to exist.