Night of the Grizzlies Page 6

  That Summer: Granite Park

  Eight 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.

  For several days, they worked almost around the clock, readying the chalet that they would help to manage all summer, along with Mrs. Eileen Anderson. The Waltons would take care of the guests, and Mrs. Anderson, a middle-aged woman from Minnesota, would boss a crew of girls who attended to everything else: the kitchen work, the bed making, and the general housekeeping. It fell to Tom Walton, as the only man on the premises, to dig out the water system; it lay under five feet of snow and took him the better part of a day to reach. It also fell to him to fire up a small incinerator that the Park Service had installed for burning garbage, but only a few trials with the gadget showed the young Walton that someone had bought the wrong size. The incinerator would barely burn away the garbage of the eight or ten members of the chalet staff, and Walton told his wife that as soon as the guests began arriving they would have to figure out another system. They had been told to avoid dumping too much garbage out in the gully behind the chalet, because that would attract grizzlies, and grizzlies would be dangerous to the guests.

  The young couple had given little thought to the big bears in the general busyness of their first two or three days in the lonely place. Everyone had told them that they would see grizzlies galore during the summer; indeed, grizzlies were the main attraction at the chalet, and everybody for miles around knew it. When tourists would check in at the visitors’ centers at St. Mary and Rising Sun and Logan Pass and the ranger headquarters on the west side, they would soon find out that the most exciting trip in the park was the one to Granite Park
Chalet to see the grizzlies.

  But after several days, the Waltons began to wonder, and a few veteran members of the housekeeping staff, mostly young girls, began to worry. “Tom,” one of them said one night, “we haven’t even seen a sign of a bear. Maybe they’re not gonna show up this summer.”

  “Oh, that would be awful!” said another. “They’re our main drawing card.” Drawing card or not, the bears could take their time so far as Tom Walton was concerned. He was not in terror of the big animals, but he entertained no illusions about them, either. Walton was a native of Idaho; he had been stomping around grizzly woods all his life and listening to tales about the great beasts, and while he knew that they were relatively harmless, he also knew that the house was four miles from the nearest road and had absolutely no medical facilities and not so much as a twenty-gauge shotgun to drive rogue animals away.

  By the third night, the chalet staff was intact, and everything was in readiness for the guests, who would begin arriving shortly after the official opening on July 1. It was nearly midnight; two of the girls were sitting around downstairs drinking a final cup of coffee, and the Waltons were almost asleep in their room just above, when the door to the outside began banging and a very annoyed Tom Walton climbed out of bed in his boxer shorts to secure the lock. He opened the door momentarily and flicked his flashlight beam down the back stairs and picked up the bright-orange eyes of a big animal. He realized that he was looking at a grizzly, standing on top of a snowdrift not twenty feet away, and he slammed the door and locked it. “Don’t go out there!” he shouted through the cracks in the floor. “There’s a grizzly outside.” The girls jumped up, ran out the back door, and began searching for the animal. Luckily it had fled. Trying to get back to sleep upstairs, Tom Walton wondered what would possess a person to walk out into the snows of midnight to try to get a close-up glimpse of a monstrous terrestrial beast of prey.

  For the next few nights, grizzlies would arrive, sniff around the chalet while everyone was asleep, and be gone by the next morning. The Waltons were fascinated by their tracks, especially the persistent track of an adult with cubs. Every morning, they would see the same signs, but no matter how late they stayed up at the darkened windows, bear watching, they could see nothing. Wearily they would tum in, and the next morning the tracks of mother and young would be clearly marked in the packed drifts. Once the couple mixed up a batter of plaster and water and tried to make a cast in the snow, but the process did not work. Soon there were so many tracks that one would lap over another as though the animals had been staging sprint contests around and around the chalet in the small hours of night, and every morning the Waltons would find tracks running right up to the front door. A couple of old hands explained to the Waltons that the big bears had been coming to Granite Park for years to clean up on table scraps, and that they were probably chasing around the chalet at night wondering where their regular handouts were.

  By the end of the first week of July, regular guests were arriving, and the crew of the mountainside resort was settling into a routine, but not without complications. There were a few cases of cabin fever, mostly after still, breezeless nights, when the young girls would have to face something that few Americans had encountered: total silence, not the silence that comes to the city dweller when he goes to bed at night against an unnoticed drone of automobile engines and generators and house noises and the million ordinary sounds of civilization, but the absolute, utter silence of the wilderness. Even the Waltons were disturbed at first by the stillness; lying in their bed at night, they could almost feel the heaviness of the quiet air, and they found themselves hoping for a light breeze, or the howl of a coyote, or even a honk from an automobile on the Going-to-the-Sun Highway four miles distant Nobody was surprised when one of the sturdy young girls of the kitchen staff took off one morning, hiked seven miles to Logan Pass on the Highline Trail, hitchhiked to Many Glacier, and then walked twelve miles over Swiftcurrent Pass and back to Granite Park. “Now I feel better,” she said, and everyone understood.

  ∞

  By the middle of July, the hot summer sun had sliced several feet off the snowdrifts around Granite Park Chalet, and soon the trails were completely clear and visitors were arriving by the dozens. Mrs. Anderson, a stickler for cleanliness, was frantic about the garbage. Each night there was more of it, and the little incinerator could no longer handle the load. Tom Walton punched holes in the side of a fifty-gallon drum and tried to burn garbage that way, but each morning he would go outside and find that the bears had arrived and knocked over the drum to dine on the unburned residue. He talked the problem over with Mrs. Anderson and their boss, concessioner Ross Luding, and soon the garbage was being handled in the old manner. About fifty yards back of the chalet, across a shallow gully and up on the side of a hill, there was a cleared place in the weeds that marked where leftovers had been placed in the past, and each night all the garbage would be put in a pail and carried out to the spot. As though they had been waiting in the wings for their cues, the bears began to show up regularly just after dark. For a while, the dramatis personae changed from week to week, and the Waltons suspected that they were being visited by nomadic bears that had just left hibernation and were still on the road. Two small buckskin-colored grizzlies stayed around for a few days, but they soon gave way to others, and in those middle weeks of July there was only one constant: Each morning, there would be the fresh tracks of a big bear and two cubs.

  Then, for a few days, a consistent pattern seemed to develop. A large buckskin grizzly and an equally large dark bear would slowly walk up the narrow trail along the lava flow and begin to pick at the food with great dignity shortly after dark. While they were dining, sometimes backing off to woof and threaten each other, a small light-colored bear would run at top speed straight up the draw that led from the campground below and catapult itself into the garbage area like a character out of the animated cartoons. Invariably, the smaller bear would meet the same fate: One of the others would knock him flat on his back with a single swipe. Squealing and screeching, the small bear would usually run back down the draw at the same high speed, but now and then it would simply move off a few feet, lie in the snow, and watch till the two big bears had eaten their fill. Then it would rush into the dump, grab a few scraps, and disappear down the draw toward the Granite Park campground.

  For a time, the arrivals and departures of the three bears were so regular that Walton and the chalet employees were able to amaze the guests with their knowledge of the animals’ habits. “The bears will arrive in exactly ten minutes,” Walton would say, and ten minutes later the first animal would be heard huffing and puffing up the trail. Word of the remarkable bear show had spread around the tourist centers, and soon the chalet was groaning with sixty and sixty-five guests every night, absolute capacity. There were daily hikes from Logan Pass, led by ranger-naturalists; the parties would walk the scenic seven-mile trail along the Continental Divide and arrive at Granite Park Chalet, footsore and weary. After dinner, the revitalized visitors would sit in the chalet’s main dining room while the naturalist gave a short talk on his own specialty, flowers or birds or mammals or some other subject, and then the giddiness of high altitude would set in, and the dudes would sing songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Almost without fail, Tom Walton or one of the chalet employees would arrive in the middle of the third or fourth song and make the announcement about the bears, and sixty or seventy people would run outside to watch the animals growl and frolic and enjoy their evening repasts not fifty yards away. Walton soon learned from longtime visitors to the place that such bear shows had been going on nightly at Granite Park Chalet for decades; in fact, grizzlies were the chalet’s claim to fame, just as mountain goats were the main attraction at Sperry Chalet, a few miles away.

  One evening, the slop in the garbage pail included two pounds of spoiled bacon, and that night Walton noticed that two big bears squared off in a knockdown fight, complete with loud grunts a
nd ferocious swings and several near-decapitations. The guests clapped and applauded, and a few of them tried to creep down the gully to get closer to the grizzlies for pictures, but Walton quickly grabbed them and told them they were endangering their health. He found one man who had hidden behind a tree near the bears and ordered him back to the safety of the chalet.

  After the night of the first big fight, Walton heard that any delicacy like a slab of spoiled bacon or a ham rind would cause the big animals to circle and threaten each other and sometimes trade blows, and since this seemed to go over big with the tourists and the bears did not seem to be concerned about anything but themselves, he was not worried. Once or twice, when the bears had been acting too docile to stir up the crowds, Walton slipped a few pieces of bacon into the pail, and the bears reacted by fighting. One night, in fact, the battle broke out again after all the visitors had gone to bed, and for several hours the screams and growls continued intermittently in the night. The ranger-naturalist who had led that afternoon’s hike managed to sleep through all the noise, and a few days later he was ordered by park headquarters to provide a full report on “the bear fight at Granite Park.” The chagrined ranger came back to Walton for a fill-in, and when Walton asked how park headquarters had found out about the incident, the ranger told him, “It filtered back. Everything that happens up here filters back.” Walton guessed that the park had a complete dossier on every event of the summer, including the abandonment of the faulty incinerator and the resumption of the nightly feeding schedule, but he did not see any reason to worry. Six or seven ranger-naturalists had regularly watched the bears feed, and several other rangers, including a few executives, had spent the night at the chalet and witnessed the ritual, and only one person had expressed the slightest hint of criticism. A high official of the park had said, “Tom, don’t you feed those bears anymore.”