Kalispell: Gateway to the Crown of the Continent

Kalispell sits at the northern end of the Flathead Valley, flanked by the Cabinet Mountains to the west and the Swan Range to the east, with Glacier National Park thirty miles to the northeast and Flathead Lake not far to the south. The city of roughly twenty-five thousand is the commercial center of northwestern Montana and the largest city between Missoula and the Canadian border.

It was born in eighteen ninety-two as a railroad town, nearly died in nineteen oh four when the main line moved to Whitefish, and survived because it had already become something more, a county seat with banks, merchants, and connections that ran valley-wide rather than track-wide. The Salish and Kootenai people who lived in this valley for thousands of years before the railroad arrived govern their reservation to the south and manage Flathead Lake under treaty rights that date to eighteen fifty-five. The valley those nations called home, with its lake, its peaks, and its brief electric summers, is still among the most spectacular inhabited landscapes in North America.