The New Flathead Landscape. Managing growth is the new buzz.

Northwest Montana is becoming the home of the transplant. No longer a quiet valley of modest communities built upon big timber, agriculture and mining industries, the Flathead is now a major importer of the traffic-weary and smog-saturated.

Tourism and construction are booming while natural resource-based industries dwindle. Vacationers fall in love and stay— or at least buy a summer house.

I recently talked with one of these vacationer-cum-residents. “We came for the first time on a four-day ski trip, and by the second day we were meeting with realtors and looking at houses,” she said. As stories like hers become less and less uncommon, second- and third-generation residents are having a harder time recognizing the old Flathead, to say nothing of buying a house here.

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We live in the Flathead Valley because we want to be here. Ray Thompson moved his Silicon Valley business, Semitool http://www.semitool.com, to Kalispell because he wanted to come back home. Don Farris relocated his entire family and his high-tech manufacturing firm, Resource Label Group, to Whitefish after vacationing here. Urban tech entrepreneurs are trading city skyline office views for the Rocky Mountains.

By Kate Downen

Full Story: http://www.newwest.net/index.php/main/article/6595/

(Many thanks to Liz Harris for passing this along. Russ)