Swan Lake forest provides natural cemetery

Cradled by two Rocky Mountain ranges deep in the forests between the Mission Mountain and Bob Marshall wildernesses, a graveyard connects the end of one life to the continued preservation of others.

Natural Cemeteries spans across 120 acres of untamed woodland off Montana 83 in Swan Lake, doubling as both a graveyard and a game preserve for wildlife such as bears, elk, cougars, eagles and more.

“A cemetery like this and wild animals go together,” said owner and founder, Henry Meyer Jr.

Today, around 17 graves freckle the landscape, some more conspicuous than others.

Simple silver markers and some more elaborately landscaped burial sites mark the resting places of people who chose to “live and die in harmony with nature.”

Those buried on the land owned and cared for by Meyer Jr., 87, and his son, Henry Meyer III, 64, opted out of the expensive, environmentally damaging formalities of traditional burials, choosing instead a simple wooden casket or cloth shroud, a hole in the mountainside and tree sapling “headstone” that will continue to grow for hundreds of years after their passing.

According to Meyer Jr., enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit, around 1.6 million tons, and enough steel to build a Golden Gate Bridge, around 90,000 tons, go into the ground each year at traditional burials. The 800,000 gallons of embalming chemicals used each year to preserve buried bodies could fill an Olympic size swimming pool, Meyer Jr. said.

Cremations also make their mark on the environment, leaving a sizable carbon footprint, using about 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas and four hours of electricity per body.

“Most people don’t realize that how you die also affects the living in many ways besides sorrow,” Meyer Jr. said.

On top of the environmental impact, a traditional burial in a cemetery costs an average of $7,000 to $10,000, not including funeral services, according to Parting.com.

The site estimates an average cost of $2,300 for a casket, $500 for embalming, $1,000 for a gravesite, $600 for the grave digging, $1,000 for a grave liner or outer container and $1,500 for a headstone.

The Meyers’ natural cemetery, however, minimizes the cost, eliminating the expensive coffins, headstones and embalming process and selling gravesites for $600, for a total of around $2,000 total.

Though the Meyers do not provide burial materials themselves, they allow for simple homemade caskets, sentimental shrouds or any other type of covering that will deteriorate naturally over time, most of which cost far less than the coffins produced for other burials.

A body in a box in a hole in the ground in the middle of the forest.

“Really, that’s how everybody used to be buried years ago, but now they make it this big complicated thing,” Meyer III said.

When he dies, Meyer III said he wants to be covered in a simple shroud and laid in a hole on top of a bunch of cedar shavings from his woodshop.

“When you’re younger it seems morbid, this death thing,” Meyer III said. “But as you get older, you start to realize, well, it’s going to happen.”

Meyer Jr. already has his casket made. The simple wooden box stands in his house, currently functioning as a bookshelf.

“You’ve got to face death,” Meyer Jr. said. “It’s not morbid at all. You’re part of a natural cycle. What could be better?”

Meyer Jr. was not born in but drawn to Montana by an urge he’d felt since his childhood in New Jersey.

“Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to go out to the woods and live somewhere way out in nowhere,” he said.

He married his high school sweetheart, Joan Meyer, and the young couple packed up their car and headed west with a road map.

“I looked on the map and every time I saw a big city, I went the opposite way,” Meyer Jr. said, laughing.

The journey took them across the country, where they ended up wandering the back roads of the Swan Valley looking for a little piece of wilderness to call their own.

The year was 1951, Meyer Jr. said, when he and his wife got their car stuck in a mud puddle on the dirt road winding through the mountains. The local man that came to their aid just happened to be looking to sell around 200 acres of land right in the heart of the mountains.

One look at the property, and Meyer Jr. said he was home. A creek filled with bull trout and other fish ran through the rocky hills that overlooked a vast forest and the mountain ranges beyond. According to Meyer III, the land was also once the site of an American Indian encampment for Flathead and other tribal members traveling through.

Over the next 55 years, he and his family lived and relied on the land, drawing most of their income from timber sales and log cabin construction.

“We’re really connected to timber and the trees,” Meyer Jr. said. “If there were no trees, we’d probably starve to death.”

So deep was his love for the land that, as he aged, Meyer Jr. decided he wanted to be buried on his land.

Though allowed by Montana, Meyer Jr. said he feared new owners would one day be able to come along and dig him up again.

The only way to make sure the property was preserved, not only as his own resting place but as a home for the wildlife that shared the forest with him, was to go through the process to have it declared an official cemetery.

The idea, he said, was to also provide his friends, neighbors and family with a way to die in their valley.

The painstaking process was finalized in 2006, when the federal government designated all 120 acres a non-profit 501(C) 3 — a cemetery permanently protected from development.

Family members of those buried there may host their own funeral services at the gravesite and are welcome to visit their dead at any time, the Meyers said.

Some have even carved seats or benches out of stumps or timber and left them at the gravesides.

Someday Meyer Jr. plans to pass the cemetery on to his son, Meyer III, who will continue to oversee and care for the land until he too passes on.

But regardless of who owns the land in the future, those who lie among the hills of the natural cemetery will continue to rest in peace forever.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.