The Westerners – Trail Creek – 2026

Human history begins with migration and territorial defense: hunter-gatherer groups moving and staking claims across landscapes.
This primal instinct to push into the unknown predates written history and sets the foundation for all later exploration.
The settlement of the American West was driven by legislative and cultural forces that encouraged people to conquer the land but the reality was often far harsher than the myth. The Homestead Act itself became a mechanism for expansion and displacement.
Living off the country was an over-crowded occupation up the North Fork during the depression years. Settlers, homesteaders, down-on-their-luck depression casualties, the North Fork was home to all of them during the Thirties. They had left their mark behind: Old cabins—some just shacks, stony gardens and small patches of land cleared for homesteads. It represented the bottom rung of existence, the survival level. But we were different, we thought. We had dreams—as though we were the first.
The area is also known as the North Fork of the Flathead River with its source in British Columbia and its mouth on the north end of Flathead Lake. The Kootenai called the North Fork by its Indian name: “Wolf Tail.” Located on the Flathead National Forest, the remote valley is unique in being the only complete biological system in the United States. No other place is home to all major herbivores such as elk, deer, moose, mountain sheep and goats plus the carnivores: coyotes, wolves, wolverines, lynx and mountain lions as well as black and grizzly bears.
Over long periods of time, memory tends to fade as the years meld together, but not from that first year at Trail Creek. I can still recall every month—and sometimes every day. The memories have been so vividly etched into the past that only a failing mind could erase them. From the first minute that we pulled into the front yard of the old Price homestead to unload our gear in early April until the storms of December buried every living thing—the details are still vivid.
Most of the North Fork was never meant for people to make a living. A closer look at the map years earlier could have told me that. Today the clues jump out: Dead Horse Ridge, Kintla Glacier, Starvation Creek, Frozen Lake—all within a day’s foot travel from our cabin. But dreamers are not looking for reality. The only name I saw was Trail Creek, or on the old maps, Yakinikak, the Indian name meaning Trail Of The Moose. There we would build our cabin.
I thought of writing in the mortar of our cabin chimney up in the attic, “We did our best, but it wasn’t enough.” I never did. How many would have understood the hard work that went into the building of a dream and the pain of having to leave it all behind? The greatest pain was that of failure and the inability to support a family. Few ever find a pot of gold in their lives but all have the opportunity to enjoy the rainbows.
Mother Nature may be beautiful but she is no sentimentalist and harbors no love for the slow, the weak, the old and the misfits. Even the selected survivors are destined to die of disease, starvation, injury or predation, but rarely of old age.
So if young men have a destiny to explore and conquer, what does it mean to set out to conquer the wilderness?
The remarkable ending to Dan’s story which of course couldn’t be answered until the end of his life in 2015 starts with asking ourselves these questions.
But in his life’s legacy, this is the focus of it. He talked about it as a dream. One of lifes many dreams but the greatest of them. In his words “dreams that only come once in a lifetime and only to young lovers.”
“What’s remarkable is not how Dan felt when they left Trail Creek — but how he felt decades later.”
“The adventure that broke him…is the one that defined him.”
This reframes everything.
What do young men do in a world with no spots left un-mapped?
So what does that mean for us who live in a place that’s still a bit wild? How do we share that but still protect it?