Whitefish Legacy Partners is hosting a family-friendly, volunteer trail building day on June 6, National Trails Day.  

The event will be a rare opportunity for the community to take part in building a new section of the Whitefish Trail at the Whitefish Legacy Center. Program Director Jedd Sankar-Gorton said most of the Whitefish Trail is built by machine and maintained by hand by volunteers. 

The new, less than a third of a mile section of the Whitefish Trail is a project led and built by volunteers. The trail will extend from the Whitefish Legacy Center Trailhead. 

It will likely be the only opportunity for the community to build in the foreseeable future, Sankar-Gorton said. 

The trail building opportunity harkens back to the early years of the Whitefish Trail, when the very first few miles were built by volunteers. 

“People were so stoked,” Sankar-Gorton said. “We’re trying to recapture that.”  

The Legacy Partners purchased the former Whitefish Bike Retreat, a 35-acre parcel in the Beaver Lakes area, to be the home of the Whitefish Legacy Center last fall.  

The property, at 855 Beaver Lake Road, has seen improvements in the road and a repurposing of the interior of the main building. The former bike retreat store will be a welcome center which will still operate like a store and will open later this summer. 

National Trails Day is a nationwide movement sponsored by the American Hiking Society and has roots in the National Trails System Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.  Since 1993, thousands of people across the country take part in local events each June focused on stewardship and conservation of trails.  

“This place is for the public. It is the heart of the Whitefish Trail,” Sankar-Gorton said. “People can come build it for themselves, if they want to have a sense of ownership -- to have built a part of the Whitefish Legacy Center.” 

June 6 will be a chance for community members to get a glimpse of the Whitefish Legacy Center property in advance of its July 1 opening.  

Volunteering begins at 9 a.m. with lunch at 1 p.m. and work until 5 p.m. RSVPs to [email protected] are appreciated but not required. Drop ins for any amount of time are welcome. There will be a variety of tasks for different abilities and for younger kids.