Montana is home to a wealth of National Forest land, full of natural beauty. How many have you been to?
A sweeping view of the city dump isn't always what comes to mind when you think of birdwatching, but a new loop of trails in the North Hills aims to defy expectations.
Officially open to the public this week, a new 2.5-mile trail loop extends the hikeability of the city's Bluebird Preserve onto an adjacent conservation easement on land owned by Republic Services, the garbage hauling company that owns the landfill next door.
On a recent hike through the preserve to view the new "Hoot Owl Loop" trail, Missoula Conservation Lands Superintendent Jeff Gicklhorn explained that a 2010 conservation easement on the 300 acres of Republic-owned land opened the door to a city-managed trail system, which became a reality following the 2023 opening of the Bluebird Preserve next door. Republic and Five Valley Land Trust are co-managers of the conservation easement.
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"It sort of identified the future potential for public recreation" in the Grant Creek area, Gicklhorn said.
He also framed the new trails as a fulfilled promise of the city's 2006 Open Space Bond and 2018 conservation mill levy. The easement used $445,000 of open space dollars, plus a $50,000 donation from Five Valleys Land Trust. Republic donated about $1.2 million worth of appraised value.
Getting to the new trail loop requires first hiking through the Bluebird Preserve from the trailhead, about a mile each way. The preserve contains two main trails that form a loop: the Bluebird Trail and the Red Tail Trail. Both of those now tie in with the new Hoot Owl Loop to the north and south, respectively.
Trail crews, including many volunteers, carved about a mile of new singletrack trail into the Republic Services land over the summer, connecting with existing roads to build the new loop. Its western side is a dirt road following a gentle creek drainage before turning east and winding over the hills looking toward Waterworks and the Rattlesnake.
"There is sort of this bigger-picture vision of a trans-North Hills trail to get from Grant Creek to the Rattlesnake," Gicklhorn said. But that's likely a long ways off, and would depend on private landowners amenable to easements that could connect the areas.
The land still bears scars from past eras of use. Hay farming and ranching left nonnative plants like Canada bluegrass and cheatgrass dominating the rolling grassland, and Gicklhorn noted that in places, the land around the preserve's overlook is as much as 60 feet lower than it was before it became a highly productive gravel mine. Leafy spurge runs rampant.
"One of the reasons we have too many weeds here is you don't have that full, diverse suite of natives" to out-compete them, Gicklhorn said, contrasting the area with the more intact grassland ecosystems found on Mount Jumbo or Mount Sentinel.
But the area isn't alone, as the North Hills were long used for ranching and even hosted a short-lived series of coal mines.
And large patches of native bunchgrass also persist, along with lupin and Wood's rose. More recent plantings of bunchgrass and fringed sage are taking root and small wooden bluebird houses peek out over the edges of the hills. Some of the only known populations of Missoula phlox cling to barren patches of gravel.
"There are some natives here. We have a whole lot of nonnatives," Gicklhorn said. "... I wouldn't say it's prime bluebird habitat in the way that other areas in the North Hills are, primarily because the majority of the grasslands are not really intact."
But beyond the "conservation values" on the land, he said the new trails -- opening up a longer 5.5-mile loop -- provide much-needed public access for residents of Grant Creek and fast-growing parts of Missoula nearby.
And the property offers views of much more than the dump. The other 350 degrees look to the North Hills, the Rattlesnake and Jocko mountains, south over the Missoula Valley and west to the ever-expanding patchwork of suburbs and condominium developments.
"We need places for people to go, right? They can't all travel to the Rattlesnake," Gicklhorn said, adding, "This is the direction the city is moving."
To access the new trails, start at the Bluebird Preserve trailhead along Grant Creek Road at the north end of the Conoco parking lot. Due to elk wintering habitat on the new Republic Services portion of the trail system, the Hoot Owl Loop will be seasonally closed from Sept. 31 through April 1.
Sam Wilson is the outdoors and environment reporter at the Missoulian.
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