Greetings, Beacon Nation! I realize it’s a little coarse to wait until Monday afternoon, during a cold November rain, to report on a new opportunity for outdoor recreation in the Flathead Valley. But I didn’t want to wait for another gorgeous Sunday to pass us by without sharing it here first: For the first time in more than three years, the nonprofit Whitefish Legacy Partners (WLP) has opened a new section of Whitefish Trail.
That’s right, the Rainbow Connection officially opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Nov. 2, marking the final section of trail planned for the Beaver Lakes Public Recreation Use Easement created in 2014 through a partnership between WLP, the city of Whitefish and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. It also signals the long-awaited completion of a 1.6-mile-long trail connecting Murray Lake and Rainbow Lake, which includes an eye-popping overlook with 360-degree vistas of the Whitefish Range, as well as a peak-studded porthole view of Glacier National Park and the Great Bear Wilderness.
I’m Tristan Scott, here to talk trail and tee you up for this Monday edition of the Daily Roundup.
Fifteen years ago, the Whitefish Trail was a nascent network of single-track that consisted of a 10-kilometer ribbon of dirt stretching from Lion Mountain in Whitefish northwest to Beaver Lake. It was designed to showcase the years of grassroots work and coalition-building that made it possible to stitch together sustainable recreation opportunities and conserve open space for the Whitefish community, threading a needle of private and public parcels to nurture the Whitefish Trail in its infancy.
The seeds of that early vision have since grown to beanstalk proportions as Whitefish claims 47 miles of natural-surface trail radiating from 15 different trailheads peppered across town, from Haskill Basin to Beaver Lake and beyond.
One of the most consequential pieces of that complicated conservation puzzle was the $7.3 million, Public Recreation Use Easement (PRUE) on a 1,300-acre parcel girding Beaver Lakes, which fell into place through a partnership between WLP, the city of Whitefish and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC).
“This connection was the last remaining piece of proposed trail when that agreement was made more than a decade ago, and until now it had yet to be built,” Jedd Sankar-Gorton, WLP’s program director, said during the Rainbow-Connection’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Standing beside DNRC’s Dave Ring, as well as trail builder Angus Matheson and project manager Keith Schmoll, of Forestoration, Sankar-Gorton noted the stakeholder partnerships that have endured throughout the Whitefish Trail’s journey, from the germs of an idea to a completed puzzle.
“So we have now built that entire trail system proposed when that Beaver Lake agreement was made, which is pretty exciting,” Sankar-Gorton said. “Murray Lake has long been on our to-do list because it’s in the conservation footprint and we think of it as part of the Whitefish Trail system, but it didn’t have a trail connecting Murray Lake. And now we have connected it.”
According to Sankar-Gorton, “it’s getting harder to get grants to pay for new construction.” So, to offset the construction costs, WLP is selling limited edition T-shirts, survey markers, and the naming rights to a gleaming new bench situated atop the overlook.
“That revenue goes straight into paying for this project,” Sankar-Gorton said.
With few community-based mental and behavioral health resources in the Flathead Valley — and as waitlists grow at the Montana State Hospital — a vulnerable population of people with mental illness is now cycling through the streets, jail and local hospital
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