Priest Lake State Forest

About Priest Lake State Forest

Captain John Mullan called the lake Kaniksu, and Father Desmet called it Roothaan Lake, which is often referred to by the locals as "God's land." One of the most striking peaks in the Selkirk range is still called "Roothaa" and one of its highest peaks, "Mullan Peak," still bears the same name.

Although it has never been authenticated, "Kaniksu" is believed to be the Indian name for Black Robe. The name was changed from Lake Kanikesu to the present-day Lake Priests, which refers to an early Jesuit missionary who set up a base camp in Kalispell Bay in the 1840s.

Lake Priests State Forest and Kalispell Bay National Wildlife Refuge are part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Great Basin National Park.

In 1963, the largest Makinaw trout in the world was caught here, and it is the site of one of the most famous fishing trips in Montana history. Dolly Varden, a neck-breaking kokana, was also caught on the lake, but she is now banned from fishing and must return to the lakes after being caught.

The Oberpriestersee is part of its landscape area, in which private land with a total area of 420 hectares are located. The area was acquired by the Forest Service in 1967 to support conservation and is home to a number of plant and animal species as well as a variety of wildlife.

The entire shore of the Oberpriestersee is now in federal ownership and is managed as a landscape area and is part of the forest management's wild landscape flow system, which includes the Unterpriestersee, Oberpriestersee and a number of other rivers and streams. The Upper Priest River, which flows into Upper Priests Lake, is a river extensively studied in the wildlife and landscape river system, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, as well as the Lower Priest River, for which it has been famous since the early days of logging along the river.

The first documented trip was in 1901, and the largest was in 1931, when a river pig was driven down the river.