Arrol Oxford's Eagle Scout project started small. Plant a few trees at Somers Beach State Park, log the volunteer hours, move on to the next requirement. Then he walked into Sliters Lumber and Building Supply in Somers to ask about donated materials, and the conversation didn't go the way he expected.
The first person he talked to was Andrea Sliter Goudge, granddaughter of the company's founder, Everit L. Sliter. As Oxford explained what he had in mind, she got emotional. Her grandfather bought the 106 acres that would become Somers Beach State Park back in the 1930s. For decades, the Sliter family let the public swim and picnic on that shoreline for free, with no state agency involved and no requirement that they do it. Sliters donated everything on Oxford's list and then some. By the time the project's scope had grown to three picnic tables, 25 native trees and bushes, and a pollinator garden, it had become less a scouting requirement and more a small continuation of something the Sliter family had been doing quietly since before Montana had an interstate highway system.
That's the detail worth sitting with if you live in Somers. The land changed hands in 2021, when Fish, Wildlife and Parks bought the property and folded it into the state park system. But the actual work of turning it into a place people can use, shade for a picnic table, trees where there weren't any, a reason to stay past the swim, is still coming from the same family and the same kind of neighborly effort that kept the beach open long before it had a state park sign out front. Ownership moved to Helena. The labor never left Somers.
A Beach the Sliters Never Fully Let Go Of
The timeline matters here. Everit Sliter's family held that shoreline for close to ninety years before Fish, Wildlife and Parks acquired it in October 2021. During that stretch, the family didn't fence it off or charge admission. They simply let people in, year after year, because that's what you do with a good stretch of lake if you own it and your neighbors don't. When the state finally took over, it wasn't a rescue of neglected land. It was a formal handoff of something the family had already been managing as a public amenity in everything but name.
Governor Greg Gianforte cut the ribbon in May 2022, calling it a half-mile of beach now permanently protected and accessible to the public. Fish, Wildlife and Parks spent the better part of two years after that running a public planning process, gathering close to 1,300 survey responses, most of them from people already living in the Flathead Valley, before settling on a long-term vision for the site.
None of that changes who shows up when something needs doing. Four years after the ribbon-cutting, the newest additions to the park are arriving through a teenager's fundraising effort and a lumberyard's donation, not a legislative appropriation.
What a State Park Still Needs This Far In
Somers Beach State Park is not a fully built-out facility. It's a wide sandy beach that shows up when Flathead Lake drops below full pool in fall and stays underwater through spring, bordered by a rocky stretch to the west and wetlands to the south. Inland, there's some tree cover and open grass, which is exactly where Oxford's picnic tables and pollinator garden are going in.
The rules are simple enough to fit on a sign:
Somers Beach State Park is day-use only. Dogs must be leashed. Fires and fireworks are prohibited.
Montana residents who pay the $9 state parks fee at vehicle registration get in free. Everyone else pays $8 per vehicle or $4 walking, biking, or arriving by bus.
The park also isn't standing alone ecologically. It borders the Flathead Waterfowl Production Area, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which closes to public access during nesting season from March 1 through July 15, beaches included. Together with other protected parcels and conservation easements, roughly 2,400 acres along the north shore of Flathead Lake now support 229 documented bird species. That's not a number most day visitors think about while setting up a picnic, but it's the reason the site was worth protecting in the first place, and it's why any addition to the park, even a modest pollinator garden, gets treated as part of a bigger habitat plan rather than just landscaping.
Oxford's volunteer workday came together on September 19, starting at 8 a.m., with people turning out to plant the trees and set the picnic tables in place. It was a small, specific fix to a specific gap: a state park that opened in 2022 still needed a Boy Scout's fundraising to get shade structures and native plantings installed in 2026.
The Other Institution That Never Waited on Anyone
A few minutes down the shoreline, Somers has been running a second version of the same pattern for half a century, just with sailboats instead of picnic tables.
North Flathead Yacht Club started in 1975, tucked into a quiet cove that you find by turning south at Del's Bar, following Leslie Avenue past the Somers-Lakeside Volunteer Fire Department and Classic Company Boatworks, then continuing through a gate marked NFYC until the road runs out. It's a private club, capped at 140 family memberships, with no boat rentals, no slip leases, and no launch access for anyone who isn't a member.
That structure hasn't stopped it from becoming the state's competitive sailing hub. In August 2026, NFYC hosted the 50th Annual Montana Cup Regatta, a race series first established in 1977 by the Canyon Ferry Yacht Club to formalize team sailing across Montana. Fifty years of continuity on a body of water that most of the state still associates with fishing rather than racing didn't happen through a parks department budget line. It happened through a members-only club that kept showing up every summer.
The same club ran junior sailing camps this year from mid-June through late August, open to kids eight to seventeen, teaching everything from basic water safety to competitive racing tactics in Optimist dinghies, FJs, Lasers, and RS Fevas. Each camp session wrapped with a Junior Flagship Regatta or Junior Montana Cup Regatta, followed by pizza and prizes, weather depending. Through the summer, members also race in a rotating slate of series, the Early Bird in June, Tuesday Night racing, Friday's POETS series, Thursday Morning racing, and a long-distance series, with results settled afterward around the club's fire pit.
None of it depends on the town growing bigger or getting more public investment. It depends on a club that's been rowing its own boat, so to speak, since 1975.
The Common Thread
Put the beach and the yacht club side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. Somers doesn't run its outdoor life through a large parks budget or a downtown development grant. It runs through people who already had a stake in the shoreline deciding to keep building on it, a lumber company that still says yes when a teenager asks, a sailing club that's kept its own tradition alive for fifty years without waiting for anyone else to fund it.
If you're already living here, that's not a hidden fact so much as a background rhythm you've probably felt without naming it. The state owns the beach. The town still builds it.
If you're curious what the beach looks like now that the trees and tables are in, or just want to talk about life in Somers more generally, I'm easy to find. Nelson Schwab has been paying attention to this part of the lake for a while, and I'm always glad to compare notes.
