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NORTHWEST MONTANA // Area Intro & Highlights
NORTHWEST MONTANA
Northwest Montana encompasses everything from the Continental Divide—running down the Rocky Mountains through Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness—to the Idaho border, tucked along the Cabinet Mountains of the Kootenai National Forest. And there’s a lot in between those two mountain ranges: lakes almost beyond counting, flower-filled meadows, pineforested hills that plunge down to fast-flowing rivers. The variety of raw, rugged natural beauty in this region makes it a truly incredible place, as the people who call it home can attest.
The many historic communities of northwest Montana began with logging, mining, and the railroads. They are now growing into their 21st century economies, which are a blend of old and new: hauling logs, but also health care, trains, but also technology. Eureka is the last outpost before the Canadian border, beautifully situated in the Tobacco Valley with a charming downtown and the Tobacco Valley Historical Village. Kalispell, in the middle of the Flathead Valley, is the county seat and economic center of the region. Whitefish, with its easy access to skiing, lakes and more, is the region’s resort town. Columbia Falls is coming into its own as the Gateway to Glacier, with a revitalized downtown generating new energy in the community. In between, the region’s communities and small towns continue to grow, while still retaining their true Montana character.
TUNNEL VISION
MURALS TRANSFORM KALISPELL’S HIKE AND BIKE UNDERPASSES
An Indigenous woman in a traditional Blackfeet headdress, depicting the moon in the legend of “The Lost Children.” A giant rendering of a huckleberry that could have come straight from an illustrated botany textbook. A Bigfoot in high heels. These are just some snippets of the creative, thoughtprovoking murals now adorning the underpasses on Kalispell’s network of hike and bike trails.
A collaboration between KALICO Art Center and the nonprofit Rails to Trails, the Tunnel Vision mural project brings an unexpected burst of color and vitality to the utilitarian concrete underpasses. Initially a response to graffiti on the tunnel walls—for research shows that public art is much less likely to be vandalized than a blank wall—the murals have also become both a continual conversation piece and a unifying community project for Kalispell. The 4,000-square-foot contemporary rendering of the ferns of Glacier National Park, inside the tunnel next to Glacier High School, was designed and directed by a professional mural artist but painted by a wide variety of community volunteers in the fall of 2021. Plans are also in place to add murals to the underpass at the base of Lone Pine State Park, adding a splash of manmade color and creativity to the surrounding natural beauty.
WILD AND SCENIC
THREE FORKS OF FUN ON THE FLATHEAD RIVER
The three forks of the Flathead River are a lot like siblings: recognizably similar, but each with their own distinctive personalities. The South Fork is remote and rugged, its upper section only reachable by plane or on foot with a pack string hauling your gear. The Middle Fork is action-packed fun, with guided raft trips gleefully hitting its Class II and III whitewater rapids all day long. The North Fork is somewhere in between: with gentler water and accessible via the bumpy North Fork Road, it also offers long stretches of solitude and postcard-worthy views of the Livingston Range.
What unites these three stretches of water, besides their confluence north of Columbia Falls, is their protection under the federal Wild & Scenic Rivers Act of 1968. This forward-thinking legislation was enacted to protect the free-flowing American rivers that still possessed outstanding natural, cultural, and recreational values. Only 388 miles of Montana’s 170,000 miles of river—less than one half of one percent—are designated as “wild and scenic.” Northwest Montana is incredibly lucky to have 219 of those 388 miles in our back yard, preserved for everyone to fish, float, camp, and enjoy their natural beauty.
