Billionaire Louis Bacon received a gift like no other on Friday at the History Colorado Center.

“I’ve never had a standing ovation before,” Bacon said, looking surprised, after a room packed with people rose to their feet, applauding the announcement that he is donating a 77,000-acre conservation easement on his Trinchera Ranch to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the San Luis Valley.

This builds on the June announcement that he would donate a perpetual conservation easement on his 90,000-acre Blanca Ranch.

Together, they bring the total amount of permanently protected land to nearly 170,000 acres — the largest easement ever given to Fish and Wildlife.

This formally establishes the Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area in the San Luis Valley, preserving its vistas of mountains, grasslands and alpine tundra, and habitat for such species as the Canada lynx, Rio Grande cutthroat trout, Gunnison sage grouse and Lewis’ woodpecker.

“He’s giving America a great gift,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe. “This is groundbreaking.”

This is the 558th unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System, “but none of them are like this,” Ashe said. “It’s an important beginning.”

Ashe and Bacon, along with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Dan Pike, executive director of Colorado Open Lands, signed the conservation easement to formally establish the new refuge.

They also signed a memorandum of agreement to complement an existing Colorado Open Lands easement agreement already in place on the property.

“This is a significant innovation” in agreements, said Bacon, because it is a “three-pronged agreement between a land trust, private owner and the U.S. federal government.”

Bacon has a long history of conservation philanthropy. He was influenced by his grandfather, Louis T. Moore, an environmental advocate who earned the nickname “Bully” in the early 1900s for his battle to protect stately old trees from development in southeastern North Carolina.

As a boy, Bacon spent much time hunting and fishing. At Middlebury College in Vermont, he majored in American literature.

“I read Thoreau and (Aldo) Leopold, and that got me very interested in conservation,” he said.

He became a hedge-fund trader and in 1989 started Moore Capital Management, now a $15 billion hedge fund.

His many conservation efforts include a campaign to protect 208 acres in the creation of the Clifton Heritage National Park in the Bahamas and donating a conservation easement on Robins Islands to create a refuge for shorebirds.

“The spirit of Louis Bacon allows us to say the southern Rockies are now a landscape of national significance,” said Salazar.

Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or twitter.com/coconnordp