Calif. couple won't have to tear down home in Glacier National Park, judge rules
May 5-A three-year legal battle over a house being built on private land inside Montana's Glacier National Park recently came to a close with a federal appeals court ruling in favor of the homeowners, a San Diego couple.
The homeowners, John and Stacy Ambler, own a rare private piece of land within the park, known as an "inholding." According to Glacier, there are about 115 private inholdings in the park, mostly on Lake McDonald and in the North Fork area.
The Flathead Conservation District Board, a local unit of government that conserves soil, water and natural resources, ordered the couple to remove the home in March 2023 for violating state laws that protect rivers after receiving over a dozen complaints from residents of West Glacier, Montana.
The home is built about 20 feet from McDonald Creek; the homeowners never applied for the free permit that's necessary to do construction near streams in Montana.
A federal judge sided with the Amblers in February 2025, writing that state laws don't apply to the property because it's inside a national park, which is federal land.
The Flathead Conservation District and Friends of Montana Streams and Rivers, a nonprofit in West Glacier that advocates for Montana's waterways, appealed the ruling in March 2025.
"Flathead Conservation District has a statutory duty to protect the natural resources within our district," Samantha Tappenbeck, a district resource conservationist, told SFGATE at the time. "So, the Flathead Conservation District Board of Supervisors decided to appeal the decision in service to the constituents of our district, and because the board felt that there were appealable issues."
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which filed a decision in the case on April 17, 2026, agreed with the 2025 decision. Judge Kathleen DeSoto ruled that Montana's stream protection law doesn't apply within the boundaries of Glacier National Park and that the Flathead Conservation District can't enforce state laws within the park. DeSoto noted that the U.S., not the state of Montana, has "exclusive" jurisdiction over private inholdings in Glacier. State laws, especially state laws created after the founding of the park in 1911, don't apply there.
In a statement to the Flathead Beacon, the Flathead Conservation District said it hoped the National Park Service would continue to work with inholders to "support commonsense solutions that protect shared natural resources." "Throughout this process, we heard strong community support for protecting local waterways and worked to carry out our statutory duties responsibly," the statement read, in part.
The Amblers are now free to continue building the house, which is partially constructed. The building is three stories tall and visible to the millions of people who visit Apgar Village at the west entrance of Glacier National Park every year.
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