Menace In Our Northern Parks

Five miles west of Logan Pass, Mont., where a trail leaves the highway and zigzags up a wooded slope, a sign was posted: TRAIL CLOSED BY ORDER OF PARK SUPERINTENDENT. DANGEROUS BEAR. AUGUST 13, 1967. That sign blocked the way to Granite Park Chalet, a big stone-and-timber inn put up to provide rooms and meals for the hikers who use the thousand miles of wilderness trails in Glacier National Park each summer. Ten miles west there was a sign bearing the same message—DANGEROUS BEAR—closing the trail to Trout Lake on that same date.

Grizzly bears have been dangerous for all the Augusts there have ever been. It was not the fact that they are dangerous, but the strange demonstration of their savagery that made a horrifying impact on that August morning. Two lovely 19-year-old girls were mutilated, dragged into the woods and killed by grizzlies. They were attacked by two different bears, acting in much the same fashion, striking at almost the same time, at two different campgrounds which, while only 10 miles apart by air, were separated by a towering ridge and a great canyon with a 4,000-foot wall.

Nothing like it had ever happened before. The grizzly is the second most dangerous mammal on the North American continent, second only to man, but man kills his own and all other animals with such mindless regularity that we are insulated against shock in that connection. It is only when a human being is killed by another animal—a relatively rare occurrence—that our composure is shattered. And so it was that Glacier National Park, previously famous only as an incredibly beautiful mountain preserve, temporarily shoved war stories, race riots and traffic deaths off the main line of the news.

The signs are down now. Granite Park Chalet has been closed since Labor Day. When the snow begins to pile up on the mountains a grizzly finds a deep hole under the rocks and, along about November, crawls into it, alone. No mature grizzly ever sleeps in the same den with another mature grizzly. They know only one would emerge in the spring. Grizzlies are smart, ranking with lions, beavers and dogs, a shade less brainy than wolves. For five months of winter a grizzly lies in its den in a strange half stupor, a sort of suspended life, not a true hibernation, since it can easily be roused. Its temperature drops about 7�, and its digestive functions cease. Its breathing drops from 30 to 12 a minute. Next April or May the 100-odd grizzlies in Glacier Park will emerge from their dens and pass an uncomfortable week, eating little, until their systems return to normal. Then they will be ravenously hungry, savage and dangerous. They will remain hungry and dangerous all summer.

The tragedy in Glacier Park began with a picnic. One Wednesday afternoon, August 9, five little girls of Troop 367 of the Girl Scouts of Kalispell, Mont., on the western side of the park, were on a pack trip to Trout Lake with two grown-ups. In the evening, after dinner, Pat Sampson saw a bear coming down the trail. The girls ran away. But when the bear began tearing up Karen Lyon's knapsack, it was too much; they threw rocks at it. The bear went into the woods and circled the camp, so the girls hastily packed, and in five minutes were ready to get out of there. Their pack-horse was scared by the bear and moved down the hill toward the lake, but he was tied by a long rope so that the girls were able to reach him and get away. Susan Sampson, Pat's sister, took a picture of the bear from a distance, prowling over the logjam that the swift current of Camas Creek piled up at the outlet of Trout Lake. The next day the Kalispell Daily Inter Lake told the story, describing the bear as a black bear, and printed on the front page the photograph that Susan had taken. But it was not a black bear; its bulk and the unmistakable hump on its shoulders clearly identified it as a grizzly.

On the following Saturday five young people assembled at Lake McDonald Lodge, a pleasant inn of typical national-parks architecture which has a dining room, gift shop, cocktail lounge and campgrounds and where the entertainment includes naturalist talks, horseback rides and boat trips on Lake McDonald. They were going on an overnight hike into the backcountry along the trail that ran past Trout Lake. All five were among the 850 college and high school students who are hired each season by the companies operating the hotels in the park. (Around 11,000 girls apply each summer.) Overnight hikes are not permitted the students unless they have their parents' permission. Michele Koons, a frail, attractive, blonde girl who worked in the gift shop at Lake McDonald Lodge, telephoned her parents in San Diego (where Michele was a sophomore at California Western University) to get their consent to the trip. Her parents talked to the assistant manager of the gift shop before deciding. Michele was universally popular—"one of our absolutely top students," the personnel director of Glacier Park said, "and among the best of our applicants."

Michele and Ray Noseck, the 23-year-old manager of a service station near the lodge, had a long wait before the rest of the party arrived. The other three students on the hike worked in another inn—Glacier Park Lodge, just outside the southeast entrance of the park, some 60 miles from Lake McDonald—and were taking advantage of their day off to see some of the park itself. They were so late in arriving that the hikers did not get away until after lunch. Denise Huckle, a junior at the University of Arizona who worked as a room clerk at Glacier Park Lodge, had picked up a stray dog she called Squirt. "I remember Denise had found this abandoned dog," said Dorothy Love, who managed the gift shop, "and they were looking around for a piece of cord to make a leash for him." It is a violation of park regulations to bring a dog in the backcountry of Glacier, but the kids thought the use of a leash would make it all right.

The other two hikers were Paul Dunn, a 16-year-old high school boy from Minnesota, and Ron Noseck, a waiter at the Glacier Park Lodge, the younger brother of Ray. Ray and Ron were from the small desert town of Oracle in southern Arizona, both dental students at the University of Louisville. The trail the hikers followed ran by a ranger cabin at the northern end of Lake McDonald and then climbed pretty steeply through timber, rising 2,000 feet in two miles. They plodded along the southwest slope of 7,754-foot Stanton Mountain at about the 5,000-foot level. To the west the land sloped to the Flathead River 12 miles away. Beyond a little plateau the trail dropped down to Trout Lake, at an elevation of 3,380 feet. About two miles long and half a mile wide, Trout Lake is one of a chain of five lakes formed by Camas Creek as it descends from the mountains of Livingstone Range down to the Flathead River. Slopes that sometimes become vertical walls of 4,000 feet rise on both sides of Camas Creek. One of the heaviest concentrations of moose in the park is in the area. Trout Lake is a popular fishing spot, only four miles from the highway that runs past Lake McDonald. It is approachable also by another trail, longer but not as steep, threading upstream along the Camas from the Flathead River valley.

The students reached there about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. The weather was dry and warm and a wind was coming up, arousing concern about the forest fires that had been started by dry lightning storms. The hikers did not intend to camp at Trout Lake. They planned to go farther up Camas Creek, some two miles to Arrow Lake, where there was a cabin beside the trail. But two campers they met reported there was a troublesome bear in the Arrow Lake area. So the students decided to halt at Trout Lake and put up their camp on the shore, near the logjam at the end of the lake.

Michele remained at the camp with the dog while the others fished on the lake. They fished until nearly 8 o'clock. Then, while they were all cooking hot dogs around the camp-fire, Michele first sighted the grizzly in the woods. She said, "There's a bear!" and the five ran 50 yards down the lake-front. The bear prowled around the camp, eating their food. Someone said that when it left it carried Michele's travel kit in its teeth, but people were too frightened to be sure of exactly what happened. When the students returned to their camp after the bear had left, they found it had eaten all their food except a box of cookies and cheese crackers.