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).
Book interior design and eBook formatting by BEAUTeBOOK
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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

O
n 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

A
t 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 indistinguishable 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.