Holland Falls Trailhead

The road ends past the boat ramp. Forest Road #44 leaves Highway 83 near mile marker 35 and runs east to Holland Lake. The Forest Service gives the distance as about three miles, and the Seeley Lake Historical Museum’s trail guide gives four miles to the end of the road. Along the way it passes the day use area, the Forest Service campground and Holland Lake Lodge, then stops at the trailhead on the north side of the lake. Most people who start walking here, the museum guide says, are staying at the lodge or the campground.

The lake covers 416 acres at 4,050 feet in the Swan Valley, with tamarack, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir on its shores. Boats go out from the campground ramp, some visitors water ski, and anglers fish for trout and kokanee salmon. The picnic areas by the water open onto gravel beaches. The campground runs from mid-May to late September, and quiet hours last from 6 p.m. to 10 a.m. Food, stock feed, garbage and anything else that draws animals must be stored. Horses take water and feed half a mile away at the Owl Creek Packer Camp.

The trail along the north shore

The Holland Falls National Recreation Trail is for hikers. The museum guide excludes stock, motor vehicles and mountain bikes. The trail follows the lakeshore, then climbs a talus slope at a moderate grade, gaining 750 feet over 1.6 miles to the falls. Much of the route crosses an exposed south slope. That slope gives open views and, in summer, heat, and the guide’s advice is to carry water. The lake lies below with the Mission Mountains behind it, and the Swan Range stands close above. The falls drop about 40 feet. A Missoulian article quoted by the columnist Jim Harmon called Holland “the most beautiful of all the lakes in this territory: three miles in length, running from west to east where the falls drop down from the sheer crevice of the Gordon Pass.” Upper Holland Lake lies farther on toward that pass, for what the guide calls “the more adventuresome.”

The trail was certified as a National Recreation Trail on July 18, 1983. The application on file from that year records a 1.5-mile out-and-back with a soil tread about 36 inches wide, running from 4,081 to 4,395 feet. The museum guide gives 4,050 feet at the trailhead and 4,800 at the falls. The trail is open all year, though snow usually covers it from late November through mid-April.

A hotel sided with half-logs

Holland Lake Lodge describes its main building as dating from about 1947. It operates under a special use authorization on the Flathead National Forest, with lakeside cabins and a dining room. Sharon and Steve Lamar of the Upper Swan Valley Historical Society trace it to 1924. That year Roria “Babe” Wilhelm, his sister Ada and her husband Art White leased land from the Forest Service and built the Mountain View Hotel near the lake. The lumber came from Babe’s steam-powered sawmill, and the walls were sided with half-logs to look like log construction. The hotel later took the name Holland Lake Lodge. The lodge also gives 1924 as its opening year and says that guests then made a two-day stagecoach ride from Missoula. The Montana place-names record says the building was meant for tourists who came to hunt and fish.

Harmon dates the lodge to 1925, from a Missoula Sentinel report that January. According to that report, the Forest Service had issued a permit for a summer resort with “a main building 40 by 60 feet in size, and a number of cabins for individual use.” At the time only a wagon road ran through the Swan Valley. In 1925 the federal bureau of public roads began surveying a route between the Swan and Mission ranges. Car owners were lobbying then for “a first class highway into the Swan river country.” The lodge says power reached the valley in the late 1950s and Highway 83 was paved in the early 1960s.

The resort sold in 1930 to Paul Judge of Missoula for $30,000. That same summer the Keewaydin Girls began arriving. This camp troupe of girls “from various parts of the east” came to Holland Lake every year until 1958, under Miss Gertrude E. Clarkson of Short Hills, New Jersey. The Missoulian met their train on a Sunday morning in July 1937: “When the train pulled in Sunday morning the girls, already attired in their cowboy outfits, were out and raring to go to the ranch at the lake.” Each girl had her own saddle horse for the season. Some who had come before asked D.A. White, who was running the lodge, for the same horses they had ridden the year before. The last group reported, in 1958, numbered 15 girls aged 12 and up. They settled in at the lodge and then set out camping into the South Fork of the Blackfoot.

The main lodge burned in 1946, and the present building went up the following year. Lewis K. Jensen bought the lodge in September 1946 and brought in hunters from as far away as Ohio and Pennsylvania. By the next year he held advance reservations, “mostly from southern Californians who are coming north for summer vacation.” In July 2023 Harmon wrote about the dispute over a proposal by POWDR, a Utah company, to expand the lodge. A citizen group, Save Holland Lake, asked the Forest Service to deny the permit. “We believe it is crucial to preserve the history of Holland Lake and protect the surrounding ecosystem for generations to come,” the group said.

Has Camas and the Holland Ranch

The lake, the falls, Holland Creek and Holland Peak carry the name of Benjamin B. Holland. He was born in Missouri in 1841. According to family accounts, he crossed the plains in a covered wagon with his wife and children, moving from Missouri to Iowa to Utah to Idaho. While improving land in Idaho, he went into Montana to hunt, fish and prospect in the South Fork country, which is now the Bob Marshall Wilderness. In the Swan Valley he camped at a large meadow the Pend d’Oreille people called “Has Camas.” He grazed his horses and pack animals there, and before long it was known locally as Holland Prairie. A Daily Interlake article reported him guiding hunters and prospecting in the South Fork as early as 1892. The place-names record names George Grant and Ed Thompson as his companions in the valley in the 1890s.

The historian Audra Browman thought the family may have used the prairie as a camp for some years before they filed on the creek. “Lower and upper Holland Lakes provided a beautiful and easy way of getting into the South Fork,” she wrote, “the 200-acre prairie or meadow furnished easy grazing for the horses between trips.” Ben established residence in 1893. He later staked a 160-acre homestead claim on the creek and meadows west of the lake, where he built a six-room log house, a warehouse and a meat house. In 1897 he filed a water right on Holland Creek. His son Charles homesteaded next to him in 1895, built a cabin, a blacksmith shop and two barns, and cultivated 80 of the 120 acres he fenced. They were the first homesteaders in the upper Swan Valley to prove up their claims. They were also the only locals there to file under the Homestead Act of 1862.

One of Ben’s regular hunting clients was Dr. Robert Gordon, a Scottish physician from Great Falls. By 1899 Gordon Pass and the Holland ranch both appeared on the Forest Reserve map. That year Ben was appointed deputy forest ranger for the upper Swan Valley in the new Lewis and Clarke Forest Reserve, headquartered at Ovando. In that job he patrolled, cleared trail, built cabins and fought fires. In 1905 Charles deeded his homestead to Isabelle Gordon, the doctor’s wife, and Ben sold her his ranch, which has been called the Gordon Ranch ever since. Ben kept working as a ranger until 1913. The Gordons let him go on living in his old house on the ranch for 50 cents a year.