Night of the Grizzlies Page 9

  The rangers at headquarters told him that they were busy with fires, but they would see what could be done. Ruder left to peddle his papers elsewhere, but he could not rid himself of the fear that any day now, there would be trouble.

  The Long Weekend

  Miss Joan Devereaux, 22 years old and barely out of college, stopped every now and then to call the group’s attention to some wonder of nature. The brown-haired ranger naturalist had majored in botany at Miami University of Ohio and Ohio State, so her trailside lectures tended more toward plant life, just as certain other naturalists tried to stick to geology or zoology or some other subject of easy familiarity. Miss Devereaux hoped that the devoted bird watchers in her group would not rely too heavily on her. She had heard them chattering, and it was plain that four or five of them were walking encyclopedias of ornithology. Joan Devereaux, in her first year as a ranger-naturalist conducting guided tours through the park, felt somewhat shaky when it came to birds. She could get just as excited as the next person over the sight of a snowy owl or a goshawk, but she was frankly no expert, and every time the bird watchers came near, she managed to steer the conversation toward flora. “See this bright yellow flower,” she would say in her most charming manner.

  “This is a butterwort, and it is an insectivorous plant. Did I get that right? In-sec-ti-vor-ous. That means it eats insects. It’s sort of like a pitcher plant. Insects will get trapped in the sticky stuff on the leaves and then the plant produces an acid that kind of devours them. Basically the plant wants the nitrogen in the insect. Butterwort is the name.”

  When Joan had gone to work that morning, she had learned that she was to make her maiden guided tour of one of the most spectacular trails in the world: the 7.6-mile Highline Trail from Logan Pass to Granite Park Chalet. The young botanist had been on the trail before, but only as a visitor. Her own guided tours were usually shorter, but on this Saturday, August 12, every available male on the Park Service’s roster had been rushed into fire-fighting duties; there had been an electrical storm the day before, and fire watchers had spotted more than 100 ground strikes and 21 “smokes.” By the next morning, the acrid smell of disaster was in the air. Joan had heard about the hot strikes, and she was not surprised when she was told that Fred Goodsell was on the fire lines and she would have to conduct his overnight tour into Granite Park Chalet.

  There were thirty-six hikers plus the girl guide, and they ranged in age from a woman of about 65 to a 9-month-old baby boy, backpacked by his sturdy father. At first, the trail cut into the side of dark, sheer cliffs; a single misstep could send a hiker plunging several hundred feet down, and the group picked its way carefully. But soon the trail reached steeply sloping mountainsides thickly carpeted with fields of berries: There were bunchberries, thimbleberries, huckleberries, twinberries, gooseberries, serviceberries, raspberries, and several other varieties. The whole hillside looked as though it had been designed and planted solely on behalf of the Ursus family, the world’s most enthusiastic berriers, but Joan quickly explained to the hikers that they were still fairly close to the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, a few hundred feet below them, and despite the profusion of berries, grizzly bears had almost never been spotted here in the summer. This brought a sigh of relief from the hikers and the usual round of bear jokes, but Joan did not join in. Every day, she talked to her fellow naturalists, and one of the subjects they discussed most was the blatant feeding at Granite Park Chalet. She was wondering how she would react to it firsthand.

  After an hour or two of walking, the group came to a place where the trail snaked a few thousand feet below the jagged top of the Garden Wall, a gigantic razor’s edge of sharply banded rock that marked the edge of the Continental Divide. Ages before, a pair of giant glaciers had come scooping their way through the upthrust of an ancient sea and scalloped out the valleys on each side of the cliff. Where the two glaciers had almost come together on their parallel routes, they had carved out a thin slice of wall that towered, serrated and crumbling, high above the hikers. A few hundred feet down from the top, white dots moved slowly about; they were mountain goats, finding something to nibble in an area that looked bare of all life. Now and then, one would frolic in a little mountain goat two-step and then look wisely down at the tourists below. Somebody in the crowd said that this was typical mountain goat behavior; so long as they had the upper foot, they acted relaxed and unperturbed.

  It was just before noon, and the caravan had been on the trail for nearly three hours, when Joan led the hikers up a sharply contoured switchback and into sight of Granite Park, two miles away on the lava flow. The view was always inspiring to panting hikers, and Joan ordered a lunch break alongside a field of asters. The rest of the hike was uneventful, except that the birdwatchers were excited when a calliope hummingbird, slightly larger than a bee, buzzed into sight, followed quickly by a golden eagle. Joan was no birder, but she shared the thrill at the sight of these two spectacular specimens. By one thirty, the weary party had crossed the last two miles of subalpine terrain, alongside alder and fir trees and an occasional limber pine, and reached the bulky old chalet. On the schedule was a short rest and a hike to the nearby Mount Grinnell overlook, but the day had been fiercely hot, and not one of the young naturalist’s charges opted for the pleasure. Mostly they sat around the front porch of the chalet and watched the smokes that signaled distant fires. A few picked flowers, and some went inside the giant mountain hut to form one of those laughing, happy round-table groups that can be found not only in Glacier Park but on the Mont Blanc, the Swiss Alps, the Dolomites, wherever people gather to cast aside their inhibitions and their cares in the special giddiness of altitude. Joan went from group to group, answering questions, trying to be of assistance, and she could not help laughing with the revelers when one of them pointed out the last item on the blackboard menu next to the kitchen. “Grizzly burgers,” it read, “all sold out.”

  As she was standing at the main entrance to the chalet, the girl in the green Park Service uniform was approached by a young couple whom she did not recognize from the tour. They told her that their name was Klein and that they had hiked in alone, and they wondered if she could tell them where the overnight camping area was. Still in the gay mood of the crowd inside, Joan pointed down the hill toward the Granite Park campground and said, “Did you bring your grizzly repellent with you?” When Mrs. Klein seemed concerned, the young naturalist told her that there were some grizzlies around, but that people did indeed camp in the area below the chalet, and they were welcome to do the same. The Kleins thanked her and walked off, talking animatedly to each other.

  After dinner, the traditional community sing began, slowly at first, but at last threatening the heavily timbered walls of the building. Right in the middle of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” a young girl burst into the big dining room and shouted, “They’re here! They’re here! Here’s the big attraction!”

  Joan knew what the girl meant, and she hushed the group and announced in a flat voice, “Well, supposedly they’re here. The bears, that is. I’m sure you’ve all heard about them. Now why don’t you just go quietly around this way and up to the balcony and watch them from a safe place?” But she had not even finished her suggestion when the crowd, by now swollen to sixty or sixty-five by hikers who had arrived later, began to elbow past her toward the back door. They spilled into the night and milled around at ground level trying to see over one another. About fifty yards away, a small silvertip nibbled at something on the ground.

  Joan Devereaux looked briefly at the bear and found herself in instant agreement with the idea she had heard expressed so often by her senior naturalists. She did not profess to be an expert on bears, let alone on the huge grizzlies, but it seemed to her that there was genuine danger in the proximity of murmuring humans and feeding bears. Over and over, she had heard naturalists say that sooner or later something had to happen, and now she could see why. A few of the bolder onlookers crept down the gully to be closer to the feeding anima
l, and the young lady naturalist turned away from the scene and walked to the front porch of the chalet. For a while, she stared across the valley of McDonald Creek toward Heaven’s Peak, 9,000 feet high, and watched the sun sink in shades of purple and pink and crimson and give way suddenly to a crisp slice of moon, vivid and sharp in the early evening. Thin shafts of smoke from a few small fires in the valley stood straight and tall in the moonlight, like columns of pale steel, and there was the faintest smell of burning wood on the air. Joan thought briefly that she had never seen so calm or so beautiful a night, and then the deep fatigue of the long, hard day set in, and she went inside to bed.

  The Kleins, Robert and Janet, had not been married long enough for major arguments, but now they were having a major disagreement. Janet had heard about the bears of Granite Park Chalet, and she announced that there was no force on Earth, including her handsome six-foot seven-inch husband, that could get her to sleep out in the campground that night. For his part, Robert still was not convinced that the presence of a few bears should change their plans for a night underneath the limitless vault of the sky. Janet was more than a foot shorter than her husband and weighed barely 100 pounds, but she stood her ground and finally announced that big brave Robert could sleep outside if he wanted to, but she was going to scrape $ 12.50 out of her packsack and sleep in the chalet.

  “You would do that?” the shocked husband asked.

  “I certainly would,” said the determined young lady.

  It was odd how the subject of bears had come up so often on the young couple’s camping trip. Nothing had been further from their minds when they had planned the two-week excursion into Glacier National Park. Robert, a 23 year-old geologist originally from Denver, and Janet, a 23 year-old schoolteacher originally from Nebraska, were both in love with the outdoors, and when they acquired a fancy new Japanese camera and some vacation time simultaneously, they decided to put both to use on a camping trip. The idea might have been sound, but an immediate complication set in: On one of their first day hikes in Glacier Park, they left the camera at their luncheon site, and when they returned to retrieve it, the camera was gone. “That should have tipped us off right away that we were operating under a dark cloud,” Janet said later, “but all we did was borrow a camera from a friend and keep right on going.”

  The friend was Robert Frauson, ranger-in-charge of most of the eastern portion of the park and one of the most highly respected rangers in the Park Service. The Kleins were glad to have a contact in the green ranger uniform when they first arrived from their home in Longmont, Colorado. They had a long talk with Frauson, and they listened interestedly when the subject of grizzlies came up. Frauson told them that there was always the possibility of running into a bear and that they should carry bells or other noisemakers with them, or sing or talk loudly as they walked. If they took these simple precautions, the boss ranger said, it was extremely unlikely that they would even see a grizzly.

  “And what if we do?” Janet asked.

  “Well, there’s no set thing,” Frauson said. “You can’t outrun them, that’s for sure, so maybe the best thing is to run for a tree, and if you can’t find a tree, just roll up in a fetal position and take whatever the bear dishes out.”

  The Kleins had all but forgotten Frauson’s advice in the general exuberance and delight of planning a seven-mile hike to Granite Park Chalet a few days later. To be sure, they wore their bear bells as they set out from Logan Pass a few hours after Joan Devereaux’s party on Saturday, but as they picked their way along the tall cliffs and gazed across McDonald Valley at the mauve-, purple-, and pink-banded peaks that shattered the skyline, bears were forgotten. Bob Klein clicked his borrowed camera at marmots and ground squirrels and mountain goats and almost anything that moved, including his slender wife, and despite the soaring heat of the day and the sniff of wood fire that tinted the air, their packs had never felt lighter.

  They were munching on their lunch at the midway point of the hike when another family pulled up and joined them in the easy informality of the trail. “Are you gonna sleep out?” one of the newcomers asked, seeing the Kleins’ packs.

  “Sure,” Robert Klein answered.

  “Where?”

  “Oh, we don’t know. Somewhere around the chalet, I guess.”

  The man asked the Kleins if they had heard about the bears, and the couple said that they knew there were grizzlies in Glacier Park, but they had heard nothing specific about Granite Park. “Well,” the newcomer said, “they’ve got’em.”

  Shortly before three in the afternoon, ]anet and Robert Klein were taking a break about a quarter mile from their destination when a party of four hikers overtook them-a mother and father and two teenage daughters. Once again, the conversation turned to grizzlies, and once again the Kleins were asked if they intended to sleep out. “It’s your own business what you do,” the father said, “but I can tell you for sure, there’s at least five grizzlies that hang around that chalet, and you wouldn’t catch me camping out there for a million dollars.”

  As they walked slowly on the last leg of their long hike, the Kleins realized that the subject of grizzlies seemed to be on everybody’s tongue, but they still did not know how seriously to take the information that was being offered to them in job lots. They walked up to the front door of the lonely mountain blockhouse, eased their packs to the ground, and spotted a pretty brown-haired girl wearing the uniform of the National Park Service. Klein brought up the subject of grizzlies, and the young woman said that she had just conducted her first guided tour into Granite Park, but she had been told by any number of old hands that several bears came into the chalet area each night for handouts.

  Still, she said, people camped in the woods below the chalet, and the grizzlies did not seem to disturb them.

  Robert Klein was surprised and asked the naturalist if she was kidding. “I wish I were,” the naturalist answered, “but I’m not.”

  The conversation frightened Janet Klein and disturbed her husband more than a little.

  “OK,” he said, “we’ll see about staying in the chalet.”

  They were told that the young man in charge of the rooms was in the back burning trash, and the Kleins walked around the big log and stone building and introduced themselves to a sturdily built bearded man who told them his name was Tom Walton. By now, it was late afternoon, and Walton said that he was sorry, but every bed was booked. “What about the floor?” Klein asked, and Walton told them they could sleep on the floor and enjoy three full meals for $25.

  “For sleeping on the floor?” Klein asked in amazement “Well, that’s the rate,” Walton said pleasantly. “I’d like to make exceptions, but I just can’t”

  Klein asked if they could lay out their sleeping bags in one of the washrooms that lay huddled about the chalet, but the innkeeper told them that this was against the rules, and if he bent the rules for one couple, he would soon have campers choking up the washrooms and sleeping alongside the toilets, and no one would be satisfied with that arrangement.

  “Well, OK,” Robert Klein said, “then tell us frankly, what’s the bear situation around here? That seems to be all anybody talks about.”

  Walton told them that two grizzlies had been coming in on a regular basis for two or three weeks now, that they came from the trail that led down toward the trail cabin and the campground and returned by the same route, and that they did not appear to represent an immediate danger to anyone. “They come in, eat their scraps, and leave, and that’s that,” Walton said.

  “And they head down toward the campground?” Klein asked.

  “In that general direction,” Walton said. “But I wouldn’t worry about it. Hundreds of people have camped there this summer, and the bears haven’t eaten anybody yet. ” The two men laughed, but Janet Klein gulped and told herself that the campground was out so far as she was concerned. Walton went about his chores, and the young couple discussed their problem. At first they had been in total agreement that it wo
uld be ridiculous to pay $25 to sleep on the floor of the chalet. But now Janet was thoroughly frightened, and she delivered her ultimatum that she would find the money and stay inside in safety. Robert said he wanted to think about it some more and left for a quick climb up to Swiftcurrent Lookout, 1,000 feet above.

  When he returned, it was about six thirty, and Janet introduced him to a 20 year-old hiker from Paradise, California, named Don Gullett. Janet had noticed Gullett’s pack and his sleeping bag and had asked him how he could entertain the idea of sleeping out in this grizzly-infested area. Gullett had told her that he was not worried about the bears, and he had staked out a nice flat spot in the shadow of the trail cabin. Robert Klein asked Gullett how far it was from the trail cabin to the campground. “Oh, several hundred yards anyway,” Gullett answered, and the three agreed to walk down the trail along the lava flow and take a look.

  By now, Janet Klein was wondering if she was not overreacting and threatening her husband’s enjoyment unreasonably. The trail cabin site was charming; a tiny stream tinkled alongside, and there were big patches of purple asters and red monkey flower and cinquefoil. Off to the southwest, one could make out the general area of the campground, but it seemed a safe distance away. The logs at the edges of the trail cabin had been laid out in an overlapping crisscross pattern, providing four natural ladders to the galvanized metal roof, and when Robert pointed out that they could get up the side in seconds if a grizzly came around, Janet announced bravely that the site met her approval. The Kleins made camp just below the lava flow, some 20 feet from the uphill wall of the cabin, and Gullett laid his bag alongside the lower wall.

  “Now let’s forget about bears and enjoy ourselves,” Robert Klein said, and the young couple began preparing supper while Gullett busied himself about 30 feet away. The Kleins were preparing to eat when a pair of teenagers arrived and asked where the campground was. When Robert Klein pointed off to the left, the boy, who called himself Roy and looked to be about 18, said, “Well, if the campground’s over there, why are the three of you camping here?” “If you want to know the truth,” Janet Klein said, “we’re afraid of bears.”