Flathead National Forest

The Flathead sprawls across northwestern Montana, wrapping the wild west and south edges of Glacier National Park with a couple of million acres of high, rugged country. At its heart is a large share of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex -- roughly 1.5 million acres of roadless mountains along the Continental Divide, whose centerpiece, the million-acre Bob Marshall Wilderness itself, locals just call "The Bob." It's some of the largest protected wild country left in the lower 48, home to the famous Chinese Wall. This is serious grizzly country, threaded by the three wild forks of the Flathead River and anchored by the long reach of Hungry Horse Reservoir.

The place

Flathead National Forest spreads across northwestern Montana -- roughly 2.4 million acres of national forest inside a proclaimed boundary of about two and a half million -- wrapping the west and south sides of Glacier National Park with some of the wildest country left in the lower 48. This is big-shouldered mountain terrain: the Swan, Whitefish and Mission ranges, the three forks of the Flathead River running clear and cold, and, at its heart, a large share of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, whose centerpiece -- the Bob Marshall Wilderness itself -- locals just call "The Bob." It's grizzly country through and through, part of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem that holds one of the strongest grizzly populations left south of Canada. From the ski runs above Whitefish to the deep, roadless backcountry along the Continental Divide, the Flathead is a forest of superlatives that mostly keeps them to itself. The supervisor's office is in Kalispell.

History

The forest took shape in the early 1900s out of the public land reserves of the northern Rockies, and carries the name of the Flathead River and the wider Flathead country -- "Flathead" being an outsiders' name for the Salish people, whose homeland this region has long been, and not a name they chose for themselves. Its most famous ground, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, honors Bob Marshall, a forester, tireless mountain walker and wilderness champion who helped found The Wilderness Society before his early death in 1939 at just 38. The wild country here was set aside in his name not long after, and formally protected as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Bureau of Reclamation built Hungry Horse Dam on the South Fork of the Flathead -- one of the tallest concrete dams in the world when it was finished around 1953 -- backing up the long reservoir that today anchors much of the forest's road system.

Wildlife & plants

This is one of the great wildlife forests of the northern Rockies. It sits in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, home to one of the largest grizzly bear populations in the lower 48 -- so this is genuinely a place to carry bear spray and know how to use it. Along with grizzlies there are black bears, gray wolves, mountain lions, elk, moose, mule and white-tailed deer, mountain goats on the high crags and bighorn sheep on the open slopes. It's also habitat for two of the hardest animals in the West to ever lay eyes on -- Canada lynx and wolverine, both rare and elusive. The cold rivers and high lakes hold native westslope cutthroat trout and threatened bull trout, which run up the wild forks of the Flathead to spawn and need near-perfect water to survive. In early summer the high meadows fill with beargrass and glacier lilies, framed by dark forests of spruce, subalpine fir, western larch that turns gold in the fall, and lodgepole pine.

Notable features

The crown jewel is the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex -- the Bob together with the neighboring Great Bear and Scapegoat wildernesses -- roughly 1.5 million acres of unbroken, roadless mountain country straddling the Continental Divide, one of the largest stretches of protected wilderness in the lower 48 and shared among the Flathead and its neighboring forests. Deep inside it stands the Chinese Wall, a limestone escarpment that runs for miles along the Divide and rises hundreds of feet -- in places close to a thousand -- like a natural rampart, so remote that just reaching its base is a multi-day trek. The three forks of the Flathead River -- the North Fork along Glacier's edge, the Middle Fork, and the South Fork draining the Bob -- are all protected Wild and Scenic Rivers (the South Fork's wild-and-scenic stretch runs above Hungry Horse Reservoir). Hungry Horse Reservoir stretches for miles behind its dam on the South Fork, and above the lake the Jewel Basin is a hiking-focused area speckled with a couple dozen mountain lakes in the Swan Range. The forest wraps the entire west and south boundary of Glacier National Park, and near Whitefish, Whitefish Mountain Resort (Big Mountain) runs its ski terrain under Forest Service permit on Flathead land.

Cool to know

• The Bob Marshall Wilderness is one of the largest wilderness areas in the lower 48 -- big enough that you can walk for days without crossing a road. It's named for Bob Marshall, a Forest Service man who reportedly thought nothing of a 30-mile day on foot and helped invent the very idea of setting aside wild country as protected wilderness.
• The Chinese Wall, deep in the Bob, is a limestone reef running for miles along the Continental Divide and standing hundreds of feet tall -- close to a thousand in places -- so remote that just reaching its base is a multi-day trek. It sits right on the spine where rivers split to run toward two different oceans.
• Hungry Horse Dam was, when it was finished around 1953, one of the tallest concrete dams in the world. The name supposedly comes from two draft horses that wandered off and nearly starved in the deep snow of the South Fork one hard winter in the early 1900s.
• The three forks of the Flathead River are all Wild and Scenic Rivers, carrying cold, clean water that still supports native bull trout -- a threatened fish so sensitive to water quality that biologists treat it as a living gauge of a healthy river.
• The Jewel Basin is set aside for people on foot -- a compact stretch of the Swan Range holding a couple dozen alpine lakes, with hiking the focus and the usual motors and machines kept out.
• This is bear country in the truest sense: the Flathead lies within the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, one of the last strongholds where grizzlies still roam the northern Rockies in something like the numbers they once did across the West.