Every town near a national park faces the same question: how much to orient toward visitors versus residents? Columbia Falls has chosen a middle path. The restaurants serve tourists heading for Glacier, but they also serve locals year-round. The hotels fill in summer, but they remain open in winter for ski traffic bound for Whitefish Mountain or snowmobile explorers headed for the backcountry. The timber industry that once anchored the economy has faded, replaced by tourism and the service jobs that accompany it, but also by small manufacturing and the growing population of remote workers who can live anywhere with internet access. The town hasn't reinvented itself as a resort. It has evolved into something more sustainable: a real community that happens to be convenient to spectacular scenery.

Three miles north of Columbia Falls, the road to Glacier passes Hungry Horse Dam - a massive concrete arch wedging the South Fork of the Flathead River into the reservoir beyond. The dam stands 564 feet tall, among the highest in the country, generating power for the Pacific Northwest while creating a lake that stretches thirty-four miles into the wilderness. Tours are available during summer months, a 1.5-mile walking experience that reveals the engineering required to tame even a tributary of Montana's rivers. The reservoir itself offers boating access to country otherwise reachable only by trail. For visitors oriented toward infrastructure as much as wilderness, Hungry Horse provides a different kind of spectacle: human ambition measured in concrete and megawatts, the machinery that makes modern life in remote places possible.

Summer overwhelms everything else. When Glacier National Park receives its million-plus annual visitors, many of them pass through Columbia Falls - stopping for gas, for breakfast, for the last bathroom before the park entrance. The town handles this influx with the practiced patience of a community that has seen it before. Prices rise, wait times lengthen, and locals adjust their shopping schedules to avoid the crush. Then September comes. The crowds thin. Going-to-the-Sun Road closes to vehicles sometime in October, and the visitors who remain are the winter-hardy ones: skiers, snowmobilers, cross-country enthusiasts who understand that Montana's appeal doesn't hibernate. Columbia Falls quiets into something closer to its permanent self, the town that persists when the tourists leave. That persistence is the real story - not the dramatic peak season but the ordinary months when five thousand residents live their ordinary lives in extraordinary proximity to wilderness.