America loves its small towns. It photographs them, vacations in them, makes Hallmark movies about them — Hallmark made one about Bigfork, “Christmas in Montana.” Reader’s Digest named it one of America’s best Christmas destinations. Travel + Leisure wrote about it. Thousands come for the Fourth of July parade. More come all summer long for the lake, the mountains, the Wild Mile, the art. This place is not a secret. It is not undiscovered. It is beloved.
What America does not do is protect them.
Bigfork is being quietly dismantled. And what is happening here — in this small unincorporated community of volunteers and residents on the northeastern shore of Flathead Lake — is happening in small towns across this country. The names change. The mechanism is the same.
A woman who grew up coming here every summer, who brought her own children, who loved this place for decades, told me she is devastated by what Bigfork has become. She won’t be back. My heart broke with hers.
A small town sits at the intersection of beauty and affordability — or what used to be affordability. Outside capital arrives. Developers file applications. Projects get approved in isolation, one at a time, by government bodies that are not required to consider what they mean together. Property values rise. The people who built the community — who volunteer at the fire station, who run the festivals, who hang the Christmas lights every November — can no longer afford to stay. Some of their own neighbors, seeing the numbers, sell to the highest bidder rather than to the community they were part of. And slowly, without any single moment you can point to, the thing that made the place worth coming to disappears.
Bigfork has no municipal government. It is an unincorporated community straddling two counties — Flathead and Lake — that have separate planning boards, separate commissioners, and no formal mechanism for coordinating with each other on decisions that affect the same town. Every development project is evaluated in isolation. Nobody is required to ask what all of it means together for roads, for schools, for the volunteer infrastructure that holds everything together. At a recent public meeting, a board member currently deciding the fate of Bigfork Bay asked a question that revealed she didn’t know Bigfork has no city government. We don’t. We have no mayor, no city council, no municipal police department. Law enforcement depends on which county you happen to be standing in. And the people making decisions about our future apparently aren’t required to know any of that.
That marina — 210 permanent steel pilings driven into the lakebed, 444 feet across the bay, 90 private slips and seven public ones, proposed by a developer from Polson — has not been reviewed by Flathead County Planning. The environmental assessment was written by a firm the applicant hired and paid. It represents a 340 percent increase over what was permitted at this site in 1996. The future of the bay is currently pending. But the marina is not the whole story. It is one piece of a picture that nobody in power is looking at as a whole.
A subdivision developer from Jackson, Wyoming proposed 125 homes on 105 acres in Bigfork — sandwiched between a poorly maintained gravel road and the heavily trafficked highway running through town. Residents opposed it. The county denied it. The developer sued. The county settled and allowed the developer to resubmit. They came back with just the first 51 lots — Phase 1 — unchanged. The county approved it. The remaining phases have not been submitted. Not yet. This is how it works — not one decisive blow, but patient, incremental pressure until the community runs out of capacity to resist.
Meanwhile, PacifiCorp — the utility company that has operated the Bigfork Hydroelectric Project on the Swan River since the mid-twentieth century — quietly posted a notice on its website. Most people don’t know it exists. The dam, built in 1902 and eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, is being pursued for disposition. If no buyer is found, decommissioning may be explored. No community meeting was held. No announcement was made. Just a FAQ on a website, for a decision that could change this community forever.
The park that sits on the river below the dam — Sliter Park, home to the Whitewater Festival and the beloved Riverbend Concert Series — is owned by PacifiCorp. The county managed it for 45 years. In May 2026, the commissioners voted unanimously not to renew the lease. They cited budget constraints — this from a county that has seen enough growth and approved enough new development to generate substantial new tax revenue for years. The community had been subsidizing the park’s maintenance for years. The community raised the funds that built the bandshell where the concerts take place. The county took the community’s money and the community’s labor for decades, then walked away to save their own money.
What is lost when a small town loses itself is not just charming storefronts and Christmas lights. It is a way of organizing human life — one built on proximity, on shared responsibility, on the understanding that a community is something you maintain, not something you consume. When the volunteer firefighters can no longer afford to live where they serve, when the people who ran the festivals age out without being replaced, when the neighbors who could have protected a place chose instead to profit from it, what remains is a beautiful shell. Lights on a bridge with nobody left to hang them.
Bigfork is not unique. This story is playing out in small towns across America — in every community that sits at the intersection of beauty and affordability, where outside capital arrives faster than local governance can respond and neighbors stop looking out for each other. Look at your own town. Ask who is making decisions about its future. Ask who benefits from what gets approved and who pays the price. Ask yourself when you last showed up for your neighbor — not as a transaction, but as a human being who understands that a community is something you maintain together or lose alone.
The world changes. It grows. We can’t stop that and we shouldn’t try. But we can fight like hell for how it shapes our home.
Whether you live here full time, visit every summer, or stopped here once on your way to Glacier and never forgot it — you came for a reason. That reason is exactly what is at stake. And the people dismantling it are counting on you to stay quiet.
Don’t.
Look at your own community. Really look. Find out who is making decisions about its future and demand they answer for it. Show up to the meetings. Volunteer. Find the organizations holding your town together and donate to them directly. Write to your commissioners, your governor, your senators. Call them. Show up to their offices. Don’t stop. Doing nothing guarantees the outcome. Those who tell you nothing will change are counting on you to believe them. Prove them wrong.
Ashley Atkins lives in Bigfork.