Last week I was picking up some visiting friends at the Days Inn in Bozeman and I saw a Travelers for Open Land key card holder in their suite. It was a modest little piece of collateral that Mercury produced in the process of helping a group of Montanans transform a big idea into a simple reality.

The idea: People who want to explore Montana's unspoiled natural beauty want to preserve it. (And so do the folks who make a living catering to them.)

Launched in April 2009, Travelers for Open Land is the only statewide program of its kind in the nation. It brings together the Montana Innkeepers Association, Montana Association of Land Trusts, the Montana Community Foundation, Montana Office of Tourism and other traveler-related businesses toward a common goal of preserving the natural riches that sustain them. And at the same time, it engages their audiences in a shared effort to preserve what they love about Montana. Win, win.

Through Travelers for Open Land, businesses collect voluntary donations from travelers. The contributions they collect are used to fund competitive grants among land trusts for land conservation projects. Earlier this year, Travelers for Open Land announced its first four grant recipients. In increments of a couple bucks, Montana visitors ponied up enough change to provide $2,500 each in support of the following projects. It's great to see that what was just an idea a couple summers ago is already turning into public land projects that we can all enjoy.

• The grant to the Gallatin Valley Land Trust will support the 400-acre Half Circle Ranch conservation easement, to protect a historical ranch and create a permanent trail across private land into the Gallatin National Forest.
• The grant to the Nature Conservancy of Montana will support the 12,192-acre Cornwell Ranch project in northeastern Montana’s Valley County, to protect habitat for a variety of grassland birds.
• The grant to the Five Valleys Land Trust of Missoula will support he 157-acre Madsen-Rock Creek project, which will help protect a biologically rich blue ribbon trout stream upstream from Rock Creek’s confluence with the Clark Fork River.
• The grant to the Flathead Land Trust in Kalispell will support the 837-acre Louden Family Farm/Church Slough project, part of a comprehensive effort to protect critical lands along the main stem of the Flathead River and the north shore of Flathead Lake.