7.22.26 Travel Day! West Glacier KOA
Wildfire smoke was coming from all directions, Canada, Washington and Idaho. We made the best of it and plan to come back one day!
In 1889, an
explorer for the Great Northern Railway, John F. Stevens, figured out where the
lowest mountain pass between Canada and Mexico was. Its low altitude and easy
grade made it perfect for trains to cross the Continental Divide.
By the
1880’s the Blackfeet were devastated by small pox epidemics and persecution by
the US Government. The railroad line crossed the mountains in 1891 and several
workcamps sprung up. Two of them eventually became the towns of Belton (West
Glacier) and Midvale (East Glacier).
7.23.26
The Historical Red Bus Tour
We left at
7:30 am to get into the park and meet our Red Bus Tour.
We had a
wonderful tour and our tour guide took us through Great Cedar and Hemlock
Forests, Lake McDonald Valley, Lake McDonald Lodge and Overlook, Going to the
Sun Road, a high alpine region, to stand on the Continental Divide, and we saw
glaciers, waterfalls, wild flowers and so much more!
The red Buses represent the oldest touring fleet in continuous service, famous for their roll-back canvas tops and drivers who "jammed" the manual gears.
1914 The
White Motor Company brought the first authorized motor transport fleet to a
national park.
1936 The
famous third-generation buses featuring oak frames, individual side doors for
every row, and a roll-back canvas top were designed.
The Name
"Jammer": Drivers earned the nickname "Gearjammers" because
the old manual transmissions required heavy physical effort to grind and jam
the gears into place on steep mountain curves.
Ford
Overhaul: The buses were saved from retirement in the late 1990s and early
2000s when Ford Motor Company funded a complete rebuild of the 33 buses, adding
clean propane/gasoline engines and automatic transmissions while keeping the
vintage look. Today the busses are Operated by Glacier National Park Lodges and
carry tens of thousands of visitors across the Going-to-the-Sun Road each
summer with driver-guides.
For more
info: https://www.glaciernationalparklodges.com/red-bus-tours/history/
Fire lookouts
https://youtu.be/UKCxBREchac?si=CMnmOPClxP5DveQS
https://www.summitpost.org/heaven-s-peak-lookout/559115
Death in
Glacier National Park
At least 260
people died or were presumed dead in Glacier National Park during its first
century of existence. While recent yearly figures are not fully aggregated, the
park logs multiple fatalities annually, with the leading causes of death being
falls, drownings, and natural causes (such as medical emergencies).
The federal
government does not release an exact annual number of missing person cases
specifically for Glacier National Park, but most are resolved quickly. Park
officials note that multi-day wilderness disappearances are relatively rare.
However, according to historical park records, there is a small group of people
who remain classified as "lost, never found" after completely
vanishing into the park's rugged terrain. The park's steep cliffs, dense
vegetation, glacial waters, and active wildlife make searching exceptionally
difficult if no immediate clues are left behind.
Here are
some notable historical cold cases of people who vanished in Glacier National
Park:
The
Whitehead Brothers
In August 1924, Chicago college students William and Joseph Whitehead set off
on a hike from the Granite Park Chalet with plans to reach the Lewis Hotel (now
the Lake McDonald Lodge). They never arrived. Because they came from a
prominent, politically connected family, an unprecedented search was launched
involving rangers, mountaineers, and Native American guides, reportedly urged
on by President Calvin Coolidge. Heavy autumn snow blanketed the area before
any concrete evidence could be found, and no trace of the brothers or their
gear has ever been discovered.
Frederick
H. Lumley Data from
the wilderness missing-person archive Locations Unknown lists Frederick H.
Lumley, who went missing on August 13, 1934. Lumley simply vanished into the
backcountry during the peak summer hiking season. Despite search efforts in the
areas he was believed to be exploring, his body, clothing, and gear were never
located.
David
Paul Wilson On July
21, 1963, David Paul Wilson vanished while exploring the park's interior.
Similar to other alpine cold cases, the severe drop-offs and complex scree
fields characteristic of Glacier's peaks mean that a single misstep can cause a
hiker to fall into deep, inaccessible crevices where wilderness elements
quickly erase any visible tracks. He remains on the park's permanent unresolved
list.
Kenneth
Gelston Just a year
after Wilson's disappearance, Kenneth Gelston went missing on July 24, 1964.
Extensive ground searches turned up no dropped items or signs of a struggle.
His disappearance stands as another example from the mid-20th century where
hikers walked into the park's wilderness alone and completely dropped off the
grid.
Barry
Tragen A more recent
cold case involves 68-year-old Columbia Falls resident Barry Tragen. His
vehicle was found abandoned near Kintla Lake in the remote, northwestern corner
of the park in late July 2020. An intensive multi-week search involving K-9
teams, boats, and underwater tracking equipment was deployed. Aside from a pair
of sunglasses believed to belong to him, no further clues were found, and
search dogs only indicated a brief interest near the lake's outlet before
losing the scent.
"Night of the Grizzlies"
(there is actually a book about this but I didn't want to spend $25 on a book so I looked it up myself)
Glacier
National Park’s busiest season came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 1967. In
a matter of hours, two grizzly bears had acted as they never had before in the
park’s 57-year history. Several miles apart, each bear had mauled a young woman
on the same day, in the dark, early hours of August 13. Two 19-year-olds, Julie
Helgeson, from Minnesota, and Michele Koons, from California, were both asleep
under the big sky of northwest Montana, when grizzly bears found them and
carried them off. On August 12, 1967,
Helgelson and Koons—both 19 at the time—embarked on respective overnight
backpacking trips. Both were spending a summer working in one of the park’s
lodges, Helgeson in East Glacier Lodge, Koons in West Glacier’s Lake McDonald
Lodge. Helgeson’s path was surrounded by vistas of glacial valleys and mountain
peaks. Her excursion took her from Logan Pass, roughly eight miles up the
popular Highline Trail to the Granite Park Chalet. She and a friend, Roy Ducat,
arrived at about 7 p.m., ate their sack dinners and watched the sunset before
retiring for the night.
Helgeson and
Ducat tucked into their sleeping bags outside, near the chalet, packed with
guests during the busy summer season.
Shortly
after midnight, a grizzly bear meandered toward the campers.
Ducat would
later tell investigators Helgelson had seen the bear and woke Ducat telling him
to play dead. The grizzly knocked the pair out of their sleeping bags and
within minutes, the bear had sunk its teeth into each of them. It focused on
Helgeson, dragging her about 100 yards away.
“Someone
help us!” she screamed as the bear dragged her off. Ducat, his arm badly
mangled, ran to wake other campers nearby.
Help arrived
for Ducat in the form of a helicopter with medical supplies, but an overly
cautious ranger held up the search party, fearful of putting more visitors at
risk. Nearly two hours passed before the group departed on its mission to
rescue Helgeson. After Ducat was taken to a hospital, and a ranger armed with a
rifle had arrived, the group followed a blood trail downhill from the campsite.
Soon, they
heard a noise and spotted Helgeson facedown, not far below. A doctor staying at
the chalet attended to her.
“It hurts,”
she said several times.
The group
carried her back to the chalet, where a helicopter would arrive to take her to
a hospital. She reached the chalet by 3:45 a.m. but died soon thereafter,
minutes before the aircraft landed.
As Helgelson
departed on her fateful hike, Koons was joining four fellow park employees on a
steep eight-mile journey to Trout Lake. A grizzly crashed their campsite at
about 8 p.m. as they cooked hotdogs and fresh fish. The campers ran and waited
as the bear gobbled up their dinner and scrambled away with one of their
backpacks. The party moved their gear, bringing some cookies and Cheez-Its, to
the beach. In a ring around a campfire, they settled into their sleeping bags.
At about
4:30 a.m., the grizzly reappeared at Koons’ camp. It sniffed around, biting
into one of the young men’s sleeping bags and clawing his sweatshirt. One by
one, the campers jumped and climbed up trees. From their perches, they yelled
at Koons to join them. But before she could, the bear tore into her sleeping
bag and began dragging her away.
“He’s got my
arm off,” the others heard her say. “Oh God, I’m dead,” she said.
The party
stayed in the trees for about an hour-and-a-half before running down the trail
to the nearest ranger station.
Seasonal
rangers Leonard Landa and Bert Gildart had gone to sleep with knowledge of the
Granite Park Chalet mauling. Gildart had heard the calls for help over the
radio and helped dispatch emergency responders. Landa stayed awake listening to
the radio traffic. When both men learned of the Trout Lake mauling later that
morning, they were confused and in disbelief.
The rangers
were sent to search for Koons. Landa left first with some of Koons’ fellow
hikers. Gildart, filled with adrenaline, hurried up the trail to join them.
“We were all
a little spooked by this time,” Gildart says, reflecting on the events of 50
years ago. “Here’s a bear that’s pulled a girl out of a sleeping bag. What kind
of a creature is this?”
Minutes
after they reached the campsite and fanned out, Gildart recalls Landa
whispering, “Bert, here she is.” The young woman’s mutilated body was lifted
out of the backcountry by helicopter.
The rangers
were stunned by the night’s parallel events but not by the problem bears. Landa
knew that a bear had been harassing campers at Trout Lake and another nearby
camp. And Gildart and seasonal wildlife biologist David Shea had four days
prior hiked to Granite Park Chalet to confirm another rumor they’d heard: Bears
were feeding nightly on table scraps from boarders at the chalet.
“We got up
there and we were absolutely astounded that people were standing around
throwing food out to the bears,” Gildart recalls.
The routine
had become a spectacle for visitors.
“It was
basically an incident waiting to happen,” says Shea, who spent 36 seasons
working in the park.
The garbage
problem wasn’t isolated to Granite Park. Campsites all around Glacier were not
well-maintained. Visitors, sloppy with their trash, frequently abandoned it.
Gildart later collected 17 bags of garbage from the Trout Lake site.
The day
after the deadly attacks, Gildart and Landa headed to look for the suspect bear
at Trout Lake. Gildart spotted it at 4 a.m. when he stepped outside of the
patrol cabin where the men were spending the night. He called for Landa to
bring a gun. Within minutes, the bear charged at them and both men fired,
killing it.
A forensic
investigator came to collect the bear. “They had a big knife,” Gildart recalls.
“They slit the stomach of this bear, and a big ball of blonde hair came out.”
Shea also
was on the hunt for the suspect bear at Granite Park Chalet. In total, the
park’s staff shot three bears, including the one believed to have killed
Helgeson.
Jack Olsen,
a journalist and author of true crime books, investigated the killings for a
three-part series published in Sports Illustrated. His reporting was
republished as Night of the Grizzlies.
“The tragedy
of [that night],” Landa says, “is that two lives were lost.” But Shea adds that
the “common sense” precautions that hikers follow today are the good that came
of the horror.
The tragedy
is attributed to years of poor wildlife management. Bears had become accustomed
to eating human garbage and being hand-fed by tourists at dumps, chalets, and
roadsides. The animals completely lost their natural fear of humans,
associating them directly with food.
This
historic tragedy forever changed wildlife management and park conservation
policies. The National Park Service completely overhauled its protocols to
focus on keeping bears wild, which included:
Closing
open-pit garbage dumps that attracted bears.
Installing
bear-proof trash cans and hanging steel cables to secure food bags in the
backcountry.
Requiring
campers to separate their cooking and sleeping areas.
Launching
aggressive educational programs teaching visitors not to feed or interact with
wildlife.
The new
practices soon spread to other national parks in which bears lived. By 1970,
Yellowstone, the other park in the lower 48 where people were most likely to
encounter a grizzly, had enacted many of the same policies.
Information
from:
Smithsonian: Night of the Grizzlies
Murders
in the park:
Cody
Johnson
Date: July
7, 2013 (body found July 11).
Location:
The Loop trail on Going-to-the-Sun Road.
Details:
Twenty-two-year-old Jordan Linn Graham pushed her 25-year-old husband
face-first off a steep cliff following an argument. She initially lied to
authorities before pleading guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to
30 years in prison.
Frederick
Pongrace
Date: July
1983.
Location:
Crystal Point, near The Loop.
Details:
Pongrace gave a hitchhiker, Scott David Steel, a ride into the park. Steel
stabbed Pongrace and pushed him off a cliff, later fleeing in the victim's
Volkswagen van before turning himself in the following year.
Check out my video below!
7.24.26 A huckleberry French toast breakfast!
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