Night of the Grizzlies (7 page)

The rules of the National Park Service specify clearly that such a bear must be shot, but somehow the skinny animal managed to remain alive through June and July. Now and then, an ashen-faced camper would make a report in person, and others would scribble capsule comments on the trail registers. But no one was reading the trail register (they were to be gathered at the end of the season and studied), and no one seemed to be listening to the first-person reports. A biology teacher named Ron Johns and his small children were shadowed by the bear for several hours, and when they made a complaint to rangers, they were told that the animal should have been eliminated but the rangers simply had not had time. Two hikers from California were treed by the bear and their packs rifled. When they reported the incident to a ranger executive, they were told that others had encountered the same grizzly around Trout Lake, and something would have to be done about it sooner or later. When railroad man Paul Price of Whitefish, Montana, lost a string of cutthroat trout to the bear and was chased halfway around the lakeshore, he wound up telling his story to a ranger who almost seemed bored by the news. “That bear’s been chasing people all summer,” the ranger said, “and a little last summer.” “What are you gonna do when it catches somebody?” Price asked. “Well, I don’t know,” the ranger said bemusedly. “He hasn’t caught anybody yet. ” By the middle of the summer, Glacier Park was sweltering. Day after day, new record-high temperatures were posted at the weather station, and the glaciers from which the park derived its name had long since lost their outer coatings of fresh snow; now they were a uniformly dirty white. The rocky ground of the whole park had become thirsty. The Weeping Wall was barely dripping, and at least once a day someone could be counted on to say that the Weeping Wall soon would be down to a mere frown. The splash and spatter of Birdwoman Falls no longer was heard; only a trickle of water passed over its rim. Fires broke out, and the surveillance had to be increased sharply. Smoke jumpers were called out frequently, and crews of Indians were recruited to beat back small blazes that threatened tens of thousands of heavily forested acres. The hot and unpleasant month of July was almost over when two 14 year-old schoolboy chums, John Cook and Steve Ashlock, packed into Trout Lake for a three-day festival of fishing, and hardly had the boys set up camp when a fire broke out on the ridge to the west, and they were treated to the thrilling sight of ten smoke jumpers arriving to put out the blaze. They also were treated to the thrilling sight of five or six bears, blacks and grizzlies both, coming to the lake for water, and the boys guessed that the ·general drought in the park had dried up some of the springs back in the hills. There was a light rain on the day they arrived, but it quit after about three minutes, and soon the bright sun was beating back down on them. They caught a few cutthroats, cooked them at their campsite alongside the logjam, and turned in early.

The next day, the two young boys from nearby Columbia Falls, Montana, were exploring the logjam, trying to find a way across, when they heard a noise from their camp behind them and turned to see a dark, skinny grizzly sitting on its haunches eating a loaf of their bread. Both Steve and John knew that grizzlies would run from humans, so they crept to within 10 to 15 feet of the animal and began yelling. The bear looked them over coldly and kept on eating. The boys picked up some small stones and began pelting the animal, whereupon the bear reared up and scuttled to a log a few feet closer to them and began growling. “Get out of here!” Steve hollered, but the bear only growled louder. The boys resumed throwing, this time with heavier rocks, and when one of them caught the grizzly in the leg, it bolted out of the camp like an excited racehorse, circled around a few times, and then returned and began ripping at the canvas packs.

Now that they could see how fast the big animal could move and how powerful were its jaws, the two boys retreated once again to the middle of the logjam. They figured that the bear would not stay long, and it would be safer simply to wait quietly. From their vantage point, they watched as the animal slashed their packs into small pieces and bent the frames. Then it strolled to the lakeside for a drink and came across a pan containing ten cleaned trout, the boys’ dinner. After gobbling up the fish, the bear walked out on the logjam, its head twisting for scent. The boys retreated to the place where the heavy logs petered out and there was nothing but a channel of cold lake water. Now the bear stopped, distracted by the remains of a smelly trout that had been lying in the sun on one of the logs. The boys decided to take to the water and try to swim around the grizzly to the eastern shore above the campsite. But as they were taking their boots off, they remembered that bears were good swimmers, so they decided to ease themselves into the lake, swim underwater to a point beneath the logs, and lie there with only their noses poking up for air. They had just begun to carry out this last-ditch escape plan when the bear tossed the remains of the sunbaked trout into the air and headed at a brisk pace back to the campsite, as though it had suddenly decided that it did not have to eat garbage when there was fresh food around.

Steve and John grabbed their boots and began lacing them back on, while the bear tore wildly at their camp. They crept across the logjam toward the animal, and when they were within 25 or 30 feet, they stepped into the shallow water and waded to the bushes on the opposite edge of the logjam from the bear. They ran about 100 feet down Camas Creek and then cut through the dense vegetation and headed for the trail that wound over Howe Ridge to the Lake McDonald ranger station. In one hour, the panting youngsters covered four miles, including a 1,500-foot climb and a corresponding 2,000-foot descent, and burst out on the road shortly after ten at night. A ranger heard their story and advised them to wait till morning to go back and recover the remains of their equipment. He said that the bear had been bothering people all summer and that he was planning to do something about it.

Steve and John spent the night in a nearby cabin and returned to Trout Lake in the morning. They found wreckage littered in a wide circle, and one of the packs had been dragged along the trail and into the woods to a hole in the ground about 40 feet up the hillside. Their Coleman lantern had been punctured, and the fuel had run out. Spaghetti and chili cans were crushed and torn, and two flip-top cans of Vienna sausages had been opened exactly according to the instructions and devoured. A pair of leather boots lay to one side; the uppers were scarred with teeth marks, and the tongues had been ripped away. The boys’ light-green tent was ripped and ruined. They gathered what they could and went home.

A few days later, an official report appeared in the park records. It read:
“7-29-67 Steve Ashlock, John Cook, two torn packs, torn shoe, torn tent, ate all food. Dollar value of damage $30. No action taken. Backcountry incident.”

On August 4, there was a brief item in
the weekly Hungry Horse News
. Under the headline “ENCOUNTER BEAR AT TROUT LAKE,” the newspaper noted that Steve Ashlock and John Cook of Columbia Falls were the “latest” to meet the Trout Lake bear and told the tale of their narrow escape. There was no response from ranger headquarters. Later, much later, a high park official was to comment that somebody should have called the article to his attention.

That Summer: Granite Park

E
ight or nine crow-flight miles from Trout Lake, but separated from it by the 9,000-foot cliffs and spires of the Livingstone Range, a stark and colorless mountain chalet hunkers down against the winds and snows of winter and opens its doors for guests only two months of the year. The place is called Granite Park Chalet, and it stands at the confluence of several busy footpaths, which lead like the spokes of a wheel in all directions. Four miles down one of the trails, at the bottom of a long series of steep switchbacks, is Going-to-the-Sun Highway; that is the closest one can get to the chalet on anything but foot or horseback.

The bulky old building has endured a half century of winter’s buffetings; by January or February of each year, it is usually all but buried under snow and ice, and the last patch does not melt away until July or sometimes August. But in the short warmth of summertime, the chalet lies in spectacular surroundings, like a speck of common sandstone set in a ring of 65 diamonds and rubies. The building itself is nothing more than an oversized blockhouse, an inflated version of a Swiss mountain hut. Except for a few additions and small outbuildings, the structure is a 48-foot square, two stories tall, with a heavily timbered roof and fieldstone sides. The chalet lies just below timberline, 6,600 feet, in an area where trees and brush and flowers lead an ephemeral existence. The mountainside is like some of the deserts of the Southwest, drab and almost without color for nine or ten months of the year, and covered with a brilliant carpet of flowers in the summer. The broad bench just below the chalet bursts into bloom in July and August; out of the rocky soil grow alpine buttercups, monkey flowers, and harebells, the true bluebells-of-Scotland. The delicate alpine saxifrage, a tiny flower that grows in mountains all over the world, almost seems to pop from the surface of rocks. Farther down on the bench, bear grass grows five feet tall, and one finds mountain sweet cinque-foil, Indian paintbrush, acres of false hellebores and glacier lilies, and wide patches of lavender asters, dainty and frangible. Above the chalet, a twisting trail leads through stands of miniature subalpine firs, and the shortest side trip by the hiker will turn up medallions of heliotrope, alpine erigerons, carpet pink, heather, and the white-flowered member of the rose family, the Mt. Washington dryad.

Two tiny streams water the area, and despite the inhospitality of the frigid winds that slash across the mountainside like giant scythes, a few berry bushes manage to survive, and there are scattered trees, their branches reaching out on the lee side, their windward side bare. The limber pine grows in a few places around the chalet, its thinner branches twisted into knots by the high winds. The most common tree is the subalpine fir, but here at timberline it seldom reaches more than eight or ten feet in height. Its sap smells like balsam, and some believe it is antiseptic. Here and there, a tree has fallen and rotted into the stony ground, leaving only a shadow, a trunk print, lying flat and two-dimensional like a big dress pattern. Other dead trees, branchless trunks, cling to verticality, their bark shredded and ripped by the pileated woodpeckers that throw up clouds of chips and splinters like housewreckers. Someday these bare trunks, called snags, will crash to the ground and create their own trunk prints, and it will be decades before trees of similar size can form as replacements. They will grow up slowly, a few inches per year, their branches reaching out toward the sun that is always in the south, their roots groping for a grip in the rocky soil that permits only the shallowest penetration.

Millions of years before, when Glacier Park and all of North America were under the seas, a mass of molten lava squirted out of the ocean floor and congealed into a vast ledge of basalt, and now this slab of dark rock, ranging in thickness from 50 to 275 feet, reaches for hundreds of yards around the chalet. The fine-grained basalt is the reason for the misnomer “Granite” Park. To old-time prospectors, almost every igneous rock was granite, whether it was light in color like true granite or gray-black like the basalt of this mountainside. Here and there, spatters of green-and yellow-and orange-colored lichens have succeeded in breaking down portions of the rocky slab, and miniature trees and bushes keep trying to establish homesteads in the new soil thus created, but they are seldom able to achieve a height of more than a foot or two; they are dwarfs consigned to dwarfism for at least a few more centuries.

In this timberline setting, several species of fauna somehow manage to thrive. Columbian ground squirrels are common, and occasionally one sees a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Marmots whistle at intruders, and every year or two one of the mischievous beaver-sized animals will allow itself to be perverted into hanging around the chalet, taking handouts, and the local newspapers will scurry up and shoot pictures. Higher on the steep mountainside, up toward the 7,200-foot Swiftcurrent Pass, mountain goats gambol about, and deer browse on almost nothing, seeming to find the thin slivers of vegetation as delicious as they are minuscule. Now and then, an elk will shoulder its way through the region, but the big-antlered animals are not common here. Of the larger mammals, only the grizzly appears with absolute regularity. The bench just below the chalet is alive with some of the
pieces de resistance
of the grizzly cuisine, and in certain seasons of the year, the soil of the bench is pockmarked from the busy, nocturnal diggings of the hungry bears. In the middle of this ursine happy hunting ground, the government has established a public campground. It is used by an occasional visitor to the park, but seldom by rangers.

When Tom Walton and his wife, Nancy, accepted the summertime job at Granite Park Chalet, they had only the vaguest idea of what they were doing. The only certainties were that they had some time off between semesters, and the pay was not bad, and they needed to lay up a few dollars for the next year when Tom would be working on his master’s degree at the University of Denver. For four previous summers, the 23 year-old Walton had worked as a firefighter, but this new opening at the remote and isolated Granite Park Chalet would offer him and his wife twenty-four hours of daily togetherness, minus the dangers that came from roaring fires. So they accepted, and late in June, 1967, they found themselves picking their way up the snowy trail on horseback. The chalet was half-buried in drifts, even at this late date, but they were surprised to find no grizzly tracks. One of the ranger executives at headquarters had told them that he had made a few flights over the chalet earlier in the spring, and there had always been grizzlies around, and once he had seen six on the chalet roof. Walton, a gentle person despite his fireplug build and his experience as a football lineman, was just as glad.