Whitefish naturalist Mary Sloan left behind a legacy of conservation, education, and generosity when she died on February 10, 2025, at the age of 90.
Mary was born in Deer Lodge and grew up in Superior, where her father worked a mining claim through the Great Depression. She met Gary Sloan in the 1960s at Whitefish High School, where they were both teachers. They married in 1968. Outdoors people, Mary and Gary backpacked, canoed, hunted, and fished throughout their time together, until Gary died in 2019.
After retiring in their 50s, Mary and Gary turned their full attention to the natural world. The couple dedicated 30+ years to conservation organizations, including both the Flathead and National Audubon Societies, Montana Native Plant Society, Montana Loon Society, Nature Conservancy’s Pine Butte Preserve, Montana Wilderness Association, and the Flathead Forestry Project. For decades, Mary generously shared her photography, artwork, and organizational skills with the conservation community.
From 1992 to 2002, Mary and Gary monitored loons for the Forest Service on Upper and Lower Stillwater Lakes, the Stillwater River, and surrounding smaller lakes. They visited the larger lakes five to 20 times each season, often paddling out in search of loons and nesting sites, while keeping detailed records and maps, building and installing loon nesting platforms, and erecting educational signs. Besides chronicling loons, they helped the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks monitor bald eagles and trumpeter swans in the Whitefish-Stillwater area during the 1990s.
Mary’s passion for native plants was ignited after she helped with a multi-year research study measuring plant succession at the Miller Creek Demonstration Forest, west of Whitefish. A longtime member of the Montana Native Plant Society, she served as chapter president from 1996-2000. Together, Mary and Gary helped inventory old growth stands near Murphy Lake; started the Family Forestry Expo’s plant identification station; and championed the protection of Johnson Terraces near Whitefish, inspiring its recognition as a Botanical Special Interest Area. They also contributed two permanent exhibits to the Whitefish Community Library: an extensive wildflower herbarium with detailed descriptions, preserved specimens, and Mary’s photographs of more than 100 native species; and a tree slice from a 690-year-old larch, detailing fire history and the concurrent human timeline.
The Sloans’ contributions were well appreciated, as evidenced by numerous awards. They received the 2018 Conservation Achievement Recognition from Flathead Audubon; a 2015 Special Achievement Award from the Montana Native Plant Society; the Montana Loon Society’s Volunteer of the Year Award in 1995; and the Flathead National Forest’s Danny On Conservation Award in 1996 in recognition of their work assembling fire history data, monitoring loon nesting, documenting vegetation succession following the Little Wolf Fire, and monitoring owl boxes. In detailing their accomplishments, Danny On Award language described the Sloans as “independent, thoughtful people who are looking for solutions to difficult problems. They are role models to all of us on how to disagree with people and yet still work constructively together.”
On a personal note, in 2015 I hiked to Baptiste Lookout to visit Mary and her close friend, Inez Love, who was volunteering as lookout. Mary greeted me with a lovely bouquet of fireweed, asters, and huckleberry leaves. She was 81 and had hiked the nearly 6 miles and 2700 feet to the lookout days before. Athletic and never one to be idle, she had used a Pulaski to build a trail hundreds of feet, from the lookout to the outhouse. She even lined the trail handsomely with rocks. I tried my novice hand at the Pulaski under Mary’s clear instruction. Thirty years her junior, I couldn’t match Mary’s work ethic, skill, and enthusiasm. She will continue to inspire me and many others with her life’s example.