Page 21 - Flathead Beacon // 8.3.16

A trail maintenance crew hikes along Logan Creek near Hungry Horse Reservoir.
GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
The view of Hungry Horse Reservoir from the Logan Creek Trail. GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
horseback. He hoped that he could moti- vate his visitors to help him build a suc- cessful volunteer foundation by showing them the pristine land and languishing trails. Paperwork was led after the Show Me Trip, a foundation was created, and a crew completed work during the rst sea- son. But within a year, the new founda- tion lost momentum.
“They had a bit of money, but there was no grassroots support built around it,” Flint said.
The trails continued to deteriorate until 1996, when Mike Dailey, a local realtor, “picked up interest as a civilian,”
Owen said. “He saved the whole proj- ect, by word of mouth. He held meetings, hosted discussions at his realty o ce about how we were going to do this ... He grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat.”
This summer, the foundation is cele- brating its 20-year anniversary. In the last two decades, it has grown into some- thing that Owen said “blows a person’s mind.”
There now exists an active culture of community-based wilderness steward- ship. The foundation has donated mil- lions of dollars worth of labor clearing and maintaining enough trail to stretch
from Kalispell to D.C. and back, with change. It has expanded to o er educa- tional outreach and job training pro- grams. With innovative fundraising strategies that Owen says the founders wouldn’t have dreamed of and three full- time, year-round sta members to man- age the ow of volunteers, he nds the foundation’s progress “inspiring.” He can hardly imagine what it will accomplish in
early a century ago, a young man named Robert Marshall moved to Montana with a master’s degree
in forestry from Harvard University and a thirst for untarnished, intact nature. As a child, he had explored the sugar maple forests of upstate New York with his brother and watched his father, a lawyer, fortify New York’s “forever wild” guaran- tee for Adirondack Park. He’d dreamt of Lewis and Clark’s “glorious exploration into unbroken wilderness,” as he once wrote, although “occasionally, my rev- eries ended in terrible depression, and I would imagine that I had been born a century too late for genuine excitement.”
After working in Montana and Alaska and earning a Ph.D. in plant physiology,
“The universe of the wilderness, all over the United States, is vanishing with appalling rapidity. It is melting away like the last snow bank on some south-facing mountainside during a hot afternoon in June.” ROBERT MARSHALL
he decades to come.
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AUGUST 3, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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