Tamaracks Resort: An Oldie but a Goodie

SEELEY LAKE - The ad in the Spokesman-Review was small, just two lines of print.

"Resort For Sale," it said. "Seeley Lake, Montana. 13 cabins."

Sue Heagy read the ad, picked up the phone to find out more and then went to Montana to see the place for herself.

"I really don't remember anything about the resort itself or the cabins," she said about that first visit.

What she does remember is the view.

"I saw this, and I go 'This is it!'"

With that one look at Seeley Lake with the southern edge of the Mission Mountain range behind it, Heagy found a new place to call home.

She went home and began raising money. She purchased the Tamaracks Resort in the summer of 1991 and moved in that fall with two kids, 14 and 16 years old, in tow.

In the 25 years since, Heagy has turned the Tamaracks Resort into one of the most sought after vacation spots in the Seeley-Swan Valley.

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A Missoula physician built the first cabin on the Tamaracks property in 1916. The cabin was a two-story, log home without a porch.

Soon after, the Forest Service realized the popularity of 'Seeley Lake Villa Sites' and began to lease 100-foot-frontage plots of land. Each plot was leased for 99 years.

In the mid 1920s, Maud and Henry Turner began acquiring the leases and by 1932 had 15 cabins plus a lodge. They built the cabins using loggers in their off-season. Pay was a dollar a day and a pouch of Durham tobacco.

An ad in a 1933 issue of the Montana Kaimin, the University of Montana's newspaper, advertised the Tamaracks as "Open for weekend house parties."

The early cabins had lodgepole furniture in each building and Tamaracks logoed Pendleton blankets on every bed.

An old black and white photo of the dining room shows a group of woman posing for the camera. One of them is likely Eleanor Roosevelt.

Originally, the Turners ran the Tamaracks as a dude ranch. Guests would be brought in on the Northern Pacific Railway and picked up at Clearwater Junction. Multi-day pack trips up and down the Swan Range and into the Bob Marshall were the norm.

The Turners operated the Tamaracks for nearly 20 years. Since then several owners have called the Tamaracks their home, until a small add was placed in a Spokane paper asking for a new owner.

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"We're building our own history now," Heagy said. "People come back and they remember all this."

The first morning Heagy woke up at the resort, the temperature was well below zero and every pipe on the property was frozen solid.

Heagy spent the day running around in white sorrel boots with fuzz on the top thawing out pipes with a hair dryer, wondering what she had gotten herself into.

She cried herself to sleep that night.

"There started my adventure," she said. And what an adventure it has been.

She moved into the oldest building on the property—the one that just passed the century mark—with her two kids. The cabin had wood floors, no insulation and only two wood stoves for heat.

“They were out of wood,” Heagy recalls–she had never split wood before.

Three years later, Heagy met her husband Jeff at the resort. They got married right on the property.

Since then, they built a office/gift shop, and a manager’s house that Heagy and her husband moved into.

The land surrounding the cabins isn’t manicured. The cabins are nestled in an old growth forest with individual trees that are older than the nation. Some of the largest ponderosa pine trees around the lake can be found there.

Heagy remembers one of the less fun adventures back in 1994 when a microburst windstorm hit the lake during the middle of a night in December.

“Seventy-two trees went down just like toothpicks,” she said. “Roots just upended.”

One tree went straight through the middle of a cabin—miraculously the two guests inside didn’t get a scratch.

A more recent near-catastrophe happened a decade ago when Heagy watched the Jocko Fire erupt across the lake.

“It was a day when I sat down on that patio pretty much thinking I was going to lose the business,” she said.

Embers from the fire landed on the property, but the flames never got that far. When Seeley Lake was evacuated, Heagy let residents stay in the cabins—her own guests were long gone.

She also housed firefighters for nearly six weeks while they finished battling the blaze.

Despite a slow start to the business, and the potential setbacks Heagy has faced through the years, Tamaracks Resort has flourished under her ownership.

Heagy has pulled back a bit from the day-to-day management—Jessica and Jeff Kimmel are the current managers—but she still spends each day of the summer season on the property.

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Sylvia Miller has worked at the Tamaracks for seven years and said that people will reserve two or three years in advance.

“We have the same people pretty much every summer,” she said from her desk in the office-cum-giftshop.

The Tamaracks now consists of 17 cabins and 14 RV sites. The cabins can house 85 guests and they are rarely empty.

The guests are Heagy’s favorite part.

“I enjoy the people, they’re just like me,” she said. “The type of people we get in here are people that I can relate to. They want to slow down, they want a vacation but they’re not looking for something super ritzy.”

Guests will journey to Montana from all over. Most are from the west but some travel from as far away as Sweden and New Zealand.

Heagy estimates that 80 percent of guests are returners.

In an old guest book in the office, reservations can be traced back more than 60 years. One family, the oldest returning family on record, has been coming to the Tamaracks since 1952, five generations ago.

Heagy has hosted four of those generations.

“I’ve been here long enough to get someone married, watch them have children and watch their children have children,” she said. “A lot of them are friends, they’re not just guests.”

This summer the Tamaracks Resort will celebrate the belated 100-year anniversary of the first cabin built and 25 years of ownership. The originally scheduled open house for Wednesday, Aug. 23 has been canceled due to the Rice Ridge fire and will be rescheduled for a later date.

“This has been a place that was just meant to be, to keep on going,” Heagy said. “We’ve had all sorts of crazy things happen here, from windstorms to floods to fire and we are able to recover. And here we are.”