Greetings, Beacon nation! I was stretched out on a grassy prominence overlooking the Big Mountain Ranch in Whitefish on Saturday night, listening to country crooner Charley Crockett perform following an afternoon of Indian relay races, when my phone started vibrating with news that the proposal to sell public lands had been officially cleaved from the GOP spending and tax bill. The provision’s architect, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, had faced weeks of intense opposition from a broad coalition of hunters, hikers and anglers, with conservative hook-and-bullet types mounting a united front against the proposal alongside crunchy environmental advocates and seemingly every other natural resource-dependent stakeholder group in the U.S.

Clearly, their message had been received.

“Over the past several weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to members of the community, local leaders, and stakeholders across the country,” Lee posted on X. “While there has been a tremendous amount of misinformation — and in some cases outright lies — about my bill, many people brought sincere concerns.”

But Lee encountered stumbling blocks far greater than the misinformation and procedural constraints he confronted; namely, the stiff opposition from western Republican lawmakers, including, critically, Montana’s delegation.

I powered down my device after a cursory review of the messages, but one of them posed an interesting question that I pondered while listening to the rest of Charley’s show: Can you recall an issue that’s galvanized such a wide cultural cross-section, bringing so many Americans together and sparking such outcry? I could not. Much like the thatch of denim-clad legs bending rhythmically on the dance-field before me, where Blundstones commingled with cowboy boots and mesh trucker caps glanced off the brims of 10-gallon cowboy hats, the resistance movement that formed around Lee’s proposal grew stronger as the voices of conservatives and conservationists coalesced around a single message.

I’m Tristan Scott, here for a high-level snapshot of the latest public lands discourse and your Monday edition of the Daily Roundup.

As Montana Wilderness Foundation Executive Director Frank Szollosi told me a couple weeks ago in response to the sprawling public lands defense, “a nerve has been touched, and we’re gonna howl.”

“We’ve made it our first, second and third priority,” Szollosi said, describing the relentless pressure conservation groups applied on Montana’s delegates, specifically U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, the Montana Republican who serves with Lee on the Senate Natural Resources Committee, and who publicly denounced the provision in the days leading up to the Utah lawmaker’s capitulation. Although Daines’ staff insisted that he was a “hard line … against the sale of public lands,” he stopped short of pledging to oppose a version of the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that included any public land sale provision, prompting groups like Szollosi’s to prod the lawmaker until the provision was dead.

“When there’s intonations that the senator is playing ball with Mike Lee, we are going to rally the troops around it,” Szollosi said, referring to national news reports that Daines was negotiating. “Our stance was, use your clout in the majority to put an end to this.”

In the House version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Montana’s congressmen were instrumental in opposing public land sales. That version included an amendment that would have sold over 500,000 acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah. U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, who formerly served as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, led successful negotiations to strip the sale of public lands from the House version of the bill. He and U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-New Mexico, formed a bipartisan Public Lands Caucus in the House to advocate against the sale. Montana’s other U.S. representative, Troy Downing, joined the caucus as well.

“In the House, it was an 11^th hour deal … so we have to be vigilant,” Szollosi said.

Joining traditional conservation and sportsmen groups like the Montana Wilderness Foundation, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and Trout Unlimited in their quest to protect public lands were unlikely allies such as Cameron Hanes, a hunter and popular social media influencer in the MAGA universe whose following includes 1.7 million Instagram followers, and who in recent weeks used that lofty platform to take aim at the public land sale provision.

“I’m a Republican, and yes, I did vote for Trump,” Hanes told the New York Times. “But I didn’t vote for this. I didn’t vote for selling millions of acres of public land.”

To parrot U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke’s well-worn line, “public lands are not red or blue, they are red, white and blue. They belong to all of us whether we’re from Massachusetts or Montana.”

Now, let’s take a look at today’s top stories.

What You Can Buy for About $800,000: In Romy Caro’s latest real estate roundup, she features a charming home near downtown Whitefish, a mountain-top retreat in Lakeside and a cabin on more than 5 acres near Spoon Lake. See all the listings here.