Surrounded by Wilderness

By editor

Hungry Horse, Flathead County, Montana

Stand at Hungry Horse and you are at a gate. Upstream, the Upper Flathead drains Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, and a corner of British Columbia. Two hundred nineteen miles of the Flathead’s three forks are designated wild and scenic—managed for water that stays clean and country that stays primitive.

South stretches the Swan Range for a hundred unbroken miles, no road across the crest. East of the Swans lies the Bob. Around the next bend toward the park, the Great Bear Wilderness (1978) plugs a vital habitat gap between Glacier and the Bob for grizzlies and everything that travels with them.

The marker is not selling a hike. It is locating you inside a conservation geography that took a century of argument to assemble. Hungry Horse is a town with a dam and a grocery store. It is also the place where pavement admits that the real estate that matters here is still mostly wild.