Night of the Grizzlies
NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLIES
Jack Olsen
Copyright © 2000-2014 by Jack Olsen
Crime Rant Classics
Cover design by Vixer Ching
Cover photography by James Wheeler (Dreamstime); John Bell (Deamstime).
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Table of Contents
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE
That Summer: Kelly’s Camp
That Summer: Trout Lake
That Summer: Granite Park
The Last Week
The Long Weekend
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For Andre Laguerre,
his memory.
FOREWORD
On assignment from Sports Illustrated, I went to Glacier National Park in 1968 to find out why grizzlies killed twice on one night after decades of non-murderous cohabitation with homo sapiens.
The answer was simple, of course: too many humans infringing on bear habitat, and poor management practices by the National Park Service.
To its credit, the NPS cleaned up its act soon after Sports Illustrated ran the three-part series, which was the basis for this book. But that hasn’t kept grizzlies from killing again, and again. I hope this work explains why.
—Jack Olsen, Spring 1996
PROLOGUE
At first sight, the mountains that fringe the one million acres of Glacier National Park seem bulky, low in profile and broad of shoulder, lacking the sharp needles and spires that the Europeans call dents and aiguilles, and feel compelled to climb. On some of these lower mountains and hills along the edges of the great park, stark rows of blackened tamaracks reach above the green treeline of the uppermost ridges. Remnants of forest fires of decades ago, they stand on their dead roots in the highest winds and refuse to fall, and somehow they resemble the charred and shattered rows of barbed-wire pickets that remained on the bloodied ridges of World War I. Forest fires, like wars, leave behind the artifacts of futility and uselessness.
Scattered about on the heavily wooded slopes of these foothills of Glacier Park, one sees denuded areas scalloped out of the thick forest as though a giant with a huge bulldozer had come through on an insane joyride. These places are called burns; they mark the more recent fires, the ones that went out of control and laid waste hundreds of acres before enough park rangers and Indians and smoke jumpers and plain citizens could be recruited to return the woods to man’s tentative control. In this altitude and this latitude, life returns slowly to the burns, and the colors of the new growth contrast sharply with the deep green of the old, established forest all around. One sees bright yellow bushes a few feet high, multicolored flowers on stalks that reach one’s knee, lichens and mosses of orange and purple and umber, and stunted specimens of Engelmann spruce and white pine and larch trying to reestablish a place in the family tree.
The process is slow, the growing season short, the natural obstacles formidable. A beautiful stand of red cedar or giant tamarack may have taken hundreds of years to form, and a sprout that is trampled by an unthinking hiker might not push back through the rocky soil for years. A visitor wobbles off the path and tromps upon the first green shoots of a ponderosa pine seedling and says guiltily to a ranger, “Oh, that’s OK, it’ll come up again,” and the ranger says coldly, “Yes, in ten or twenty years.”
Almost invariably, the newcomer to Glacier National Park is overwhelmed first by flora, the tens of thousands of growing plants that are just as much a raison d’etre for the park as the grizzly bears and wolverines and marmots that also reside in its interior. Long before one sees the first Columbia ground squirrel or Selkirk marten, one inhales the heady fumes of balsam and picks a path through thick stands of lodgepole pines whose thousands of years of droppings have produced a humus that pushes back against the foot. One pulls up short at broad avenues of wind-felled Douglas firs lying one atop the other like crooked scaffoldings ten or fifteen feet thick, as squirrels and chipmunks scamper in and out of the impenetrable jumble with total disregard for the laws of gravity.
Glacier Park, tucked into the northwest center of Montana, includes a pair of parallel Rocky Mountain ranges, the Lewis and the Livingstone, and the park’s 1,600 square miles spill over on both sides of the Continental Divide. Thus it stands as a sort of windbreak between east and west, catching seeds and spores from all over and turning itself into a display ecosystem of divergent species. Living among the native flora of the northern Rockies are species that blew in from California and Oregon and Washington, from northern Alaska, from Kentucky and Nebraska and New Mexico. In the middle of summer, the park lays down a blanket of wild flowers as variegated as it is short-lived. There are flowers that medicate, like wild sarsaparilla and common self-heal; flowers that can save a man from starvation, like glacier lily and bull thistle; flowers that poison, like American false hellebore and mountain death camas; flowers that induce temporary insanity, like locoweed; flowers that eat meat, like butterwort; flowers that grow on melting ice fields, like white globeflower and Western pasqueflower; flowers that commemorate famous men, like Saint John’s wort, and Renaissance flowers of many talents, like Lyall nettle, which stings, offers nourishment, and can be made into fine linen. In the middle of the summer, tall stalks of bear grass adorn the mountainsides like hundreds of twirlers’ batons standing upright in the fields, and deep in the cool woods, long black strands of a parasite called squaw-hair lichen or grizzly hair hang down from trees and slide chillingly across one’s face like the dangling strings in the fun house. Giant mushrooms pop out overnight in the damp humus; ferns grow man-high along the edges of bogs and streams; berry bushes offer the mixed blessings of sharp thorns and succulent fruit at every tum in the trail.
Naturalist John Muir called Glacier Park “the greatest care-killing scenery” on the North American continent One’s eye is taken not only by the flora but by the geology of this most spectacular of America’s wildlife preserves. Millions of years ago, a powerful upthrust from beneath the sea shoved the sedimentary raw material of the park above the waterline of a prehistoric ocean, and glaciers and storms and winds began to carve this huge exposed mass as a small boy carves a block of soap. The result, tens of millions of years later, is a layered jumble of peaks rising to 10,000 feet and bearing on its slopes the clef sign of a time when the only life on the face of the Earth was of the single-cell variety. Here are the oldest sedimentary rocks known to man; they stretch up and up in bands of bright colors, clearly differentiated from the buff-colored weathered limestone near the bottom, through the rich greens of the mudstone argillites and the reds and purples of the Grinnell argillite bands and the high brown limestones called the Siyeh formation. Dotted throughout the various layers, one comes upon reminders that each of these bands of rock was formed under the sea. Stippled rocks show where ancient rains fell on sand that later hardened into the same shape. Thousands of feet up mountainsides, ripple patterns mark the edges of prehistoric beaches, and long, jagged cracks show where mudflats hardened in the sun. On the very tops of peaks, one finds the fossils of fish and shells and plants that once lived beneath the shallow sea that stretched across the North American continent.
In the deep interior of the park, much of the land is above timberline. There are jagged and severe mountains, as broken in their contours as the outlying mountains are smooth, and high on their slopes hang the fifty or sixty glaciers that give the place its name. In winter, the glaciers are almost indistinguishab
le from the mountainsides; everything is cloaked in a blinding carapace of snow and ice, and edges blur. But as spring arrives and high winds scour the old season’s snow off the mountains, the glaciers begin to stand out, pristine and ivory white, and with the coming of summer they remain as visible souvenirs of winter’s power and might. As summer wears on, the glaciers shed their outer coats of new whiteness and show the undergarments of rock and dirt and sediment that they have scoured off the face of the mountains with ice pressures in the thousands of tons. Sometimes smaller glaciers disappear entirely, but the larger ones, like Grinnell and Sperry and Harrison, remain as they have for hundreds of years, shrinking and expanding in response to the seasons.
Because of its position astride the Continental Divide, Glacier Park has become part of several watersheds. All winter long, the snows pile up in 20-and 30-foot drifts, and the mountains act as sponges, soaking up the water as it melts drop by drop, then redistributing it, sometimes slowly, sometimes at dangerous speeds, down the mountainsides in the spring and summer. Some of the water winds through the Columbia River drainage to the Pacific; some of it goes east and south to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and some of it ebbs northward, to Hudson Bay. From a single 8,000-foot mountain, Triple Divide Peak, the spring thaw cascades into all three watersheds. Everywhere one looks are lakes, some 200 of them, and waterfalls, thousands of them. Here and there, a face of porous rock leaks water through the summer; the most famous of these is called the Weeping Wall, and it stops weeping only in the most arid of years.
The running waters of the park range from tiny trickles oozing out of mountainsides to the larger creeks and rivers, bearing such names as McDonald, Camas, Canyon, Valentine, Red Eagle, Virginia, and St. Mary. All of the streams drain lake systems, and all are full of the colorful cutthroat trout, so named for the orange-red slashes across their throats. In some of the creeks, Dolly Varden trout up to 20 pounds battle their way to the ends of the tiniest tributaries to spawn. This most predatory of the American trout is called locally by the ignominious name “bull trout,” in a familiarity bred of proximity. The bull trout lives to spawn again, but its distant relative, the kokanee salmon, gives up the ghost in the reproduction process and thereby provides the wherewithal for one of nature’s most lavish affairs. The “kokes” leave Lake McDonald each September to spawn and die in the waters of McDonald Creek just inside the southern border of Glacier Park, and hardly has the run begun before every fish eater for miles around is racing toward the scene. The bald eagle, symbol of America’s might and freedom, flies in and takes up its perch on a tree alongside the water’s edge, its telescopic eyes scanning the pools and riffles for dead salmon. In one year, 352 bald eagles were counted in a stretch of the creek measuring little more than a mile. Also in attendance each fall are golden eagles and snowy owls, sports-loving species that prefer to catch their kokanee alive. In the social structure of this particular outdoor banquet, the snowy owl, an annual visitor from the Arctic, is dominant. Sometimes bald eagles are shooed away from fish by the large white owls, and although the national bird is better equipped for combat, it does not seem to know this and invariably retreats. Later, perhaps to revitalize its sense of self-worth, the eagle may bully an osprey, swooping down to make the fish hawk drop its dinner in mid-flight. The bald eagle also retreats, but with far better reason, from the black bears and occasional grizzlies that come to the dinner, but it does not seem especially frightened of another guest at the affair, the coyote, who arrives as a sort of cleanup detail and crunches away until the very last bone of the very last salmon has been converted into fuel for another long winter.
Because they are completely protected from hunters, Glacier Park’s wild animals, such as the coyote, are slightly more tolerant of man than are animals outside the park, although there is not a wild coyote alive that will allow Homo sapiens such liberties as getting close and trying to make friends. But if the visitor is selfish and patient and utilizes such aids as binoculars and spotting scopes, Glacier Park’s animals will surrender their secrets easily. Halfway up Camas Creek, the hiker comes to a broad, swampy meadow, and far across on the other side, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, two clumps of brown fur stand motionless. Slowly, slowly, the hiker raises binoculars and brings into sharp focus a large animal standing alongside a perfect miniature of itself. The downcurving Roman nose and the clump of fur dangling from the chin identify the large animal as a Shiras moose, and the miniature quickly identifies itself as a close relative: It butts its mouth sharply against the underside of the mother for a sip of milk, leans away to munch on a mouthful of tender willow shoots, then reaches under the mother’s soft belly for another taste of milk. The mother looks over her shoulder, and the hiker could swear she gives the weaning calf a dirty look; the time has come for the young animal to enter moosehood, to stop living in two worlds, and the hiker senses that any day now the mother will make her feeding equipment unavailable to the splayfooted calf at her side.
Farther up the stream is a pool created by those industrious dam builders, the beavers, survivors of the beaver-coat fad of the ’20s and ’30s and the merciless trapping techniques of early woodsmen. Beavers are to be found in substantial numbers all over the Rockies, particularly in the haven called Glacier Park, but now one sees nothing in the pool except a narrow wake that leads out of sight behind some fresh-cut logs. Then one hears the crack, as loud as a pistol shot and just as unnerving. The beaver has whacked the surface of the water with his broad tail and thus warned other beavers in the neighborhood that a large non-beaver is on the premises. Now the animal is safely inside his lodge, his place of concealment given away by the tiny puffs of breath-fog that come out of the topside vent in the chilly morning air of the high mountains.
Swinging through Glacier Park on nature walks, one never knows where to look; there is so much animal life around that the unexpected soon fades into the ordinary. One walks softly alongside a narrow stream, hoping to come upon an otter slide or see the flash of silver that marks a fleeing trout, but instead one rounds a narrow curve and blinks one’s eyes in disbelief: A mouse is chasing a water bug across the surface of a pool. All day long, one wonders, but later the nature guide ends the confusion. The mouse was not a mouse at all, but a water shrew, Sorex palustris navigator, a tiny hunter with a pointed nose and webbed feet and blinding speed that enable it to romp across pools without breaking through the surface tension. The same nature guide reveals that the Cinereus shrew, a cousin of the water shrew, is the smallest mammal found in the park, almost never reaching four inches in length and seldom seen by humans. Its life expectancy is almost as short as its body; hawks, owls, and some of the carnivorous mammals wage a constant war on these diminutive animals, often killing one and contemptuously leaving the little carcass behind as not worth the bother.
Wending one’s way farther up the stream, and perhaps daydreaming a bit as the warming sun begins to climb above the treetops, one suddenly becomes aware of a loud hissing sound. In a few more steps, the source of all this anachronistic theatrical noise is found huddled in a narrow cut just below the lip of the bank. The rich brown fur, the tiny patches of white on the chin and throat, and the elongated weasel-like body identify the animal as a mink, one of the bravest and surliest beasts, pound for pound, on the face of the Earth. The larger meat eaters of the park have long since learned that a mink is trouble, and only a few species, such as the horned owl, are considered natural enemies of the feisty aquatic animal with the expensive coat. The mink does not seek out man, but neither does he back away, and long after one continues along the stream, the hissing continues; one wishes that the little beast would shut up lest all the wildlife for miles around be scared away. But there is no danger of that: The fauna of Glacier Park is so rich and varied that it is all but impossible to walk more than a mile without seeing something, perhaps merely a snowshoe rabbit or a Columbia ground squirrel or a Rocky Mountain jumping mouse, but something.
Often the seek
er after wildlife is stunned by the sight of specimens that would be considered minor miracles of observation if they were spotted outside the limits of the park. There are places near Sperry Glacier where it is a rare day when mountain goats are not visible. Around Many Glacier, a small herd of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep usually is grazing, and a short hike to a nearby overlook will reward the student with a closer view of these prized and rare animals. Elk may be seen along the middle branch of the Flathead River in such numbers that the Park Service has had to consider ways and means of thinning out the herd; there are some 3,000 of the big deerlike mammals in the park, and they are overgrazing their winter range.
Although Glacier Park no longer is home to certain extinct or nearly extinct animals like the bison and the kit fox, it is the last hiding place for several other endangered or rare species. The Rocky Mountain wolf, a noble animal that may weigh as much as 200 pounds and sport a coat of purest white, has all but disappeared from its vast North American habitat, and up to a few years ago, it was thought to be absent from Glacier Park as well. But lately the animal has returned, in small but definite numbers. Many of the “wolf” sightings in the park tum out to be large coyotes, but there have been enough sightings by experts to guarantee that the Rocky Mountain wolf remains in the Rocky Mountains, at least in that portion called Glacier Park.
Although the glamorous animal known to mammologists as Felis concolor missoulensis has all but disappeared from the area around Glacier Park, some are seen each year within the park boundaries, where they apparently have sensed that they cannot be hunted. Felis concoloris the mountain lion, alias cougar, painter, catamount, panther, and puma, and there is no place in the world where this shy, secretive animal may be considered common. Even in Glacier Park, one will almost never see a mountain lion, but sometimes one will spot the track of the cat in fresh snow. It is big and round and unmistakable, and the sight of it gives one a momentary fright, even though the catamount’s personal habits make it about as dangerous to man as the water shrew chasing a bug across a mountain pool.