Night of the Grizzlies

by Jack Olsen

  A few minutes later, two badly frightened teenage boys burst into the front door. Taylor heard them explain that they had been hiking and had seen another bear a few hundred yards below, and they had rushed up the trail toward the chalet, thinking it would be the last place where grizzlies would be found. They said that they had intended to sleep out overnight in the campground just below, but now they were too scared. One of the chalet employees offered them flashlights to guide their way, but the two boys asked if they could roll out their sleeping bags on the dining-room floor. The place was booked solid, but room was found for the refugees alongside the front door.

  In this final week of relative normalcy in Glacier National Park, Trout Lake was proportionately just as overcrowded with people and grizzlies as Granite Park Chalet. On a normal summer weekday, there might be a party or two fishing in the cool waters of the mile-square lake, but there might also be no one but bears and otters on the scene. Guided tours were not conducted into Trout Lake as they were into Granite Park, and there was no chalet to provide a roof against summer storms. Usually, it was only the genuine, bona fide hikers and fishermen who made the trip, and there seldom were enough of these to overcrowd the sylvan setting. But this long, hot summer was different. People were beating their way over the 2,000-foot Howe Ridge in great numbers, and their debris was to be seen all around the lakeshore. Groups would come streaming down the mountainside toward the campsite, only to see smoke curling upward, and then they would hike two more miles up the trail to the shelter cabin to the north and discover that it was occupied, and they would end up pitching camp somewhere in the open. Trail registers were full of complaints and remarks about the situation, but the registers were just as jammed as the park, and now there was no more space for entries.

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 8, 1967, a pleasant young school-teaching couple named Chase guided the girls of Scout Troop 367, Kalispell, Montana, into this less-than-idyllic setting for what was scheduled to be a three-day camping trip. The hike had been enjoyed by all; most of the dirty hauling work was done by Jerry Chase’s little gray pony, Sage, and this had freed the six young girls from the heaviest loads. They were still laughing and joking and having a happy time when they came to the trail register a few hundred feet from the lake and read the last entry: “Caught 15 beautiful trout and lost them to bear.” Jerry Chase and his wife Sharon noticed that at least half the entries on the register mentioned bears, but they were not worried; they were veterans at hiking in Glacier Park, and they doubted that there was a bear alive that would come near a camp full of giggly, noisy girls. But they had momentary second thoughts when they arrived at the campsite along the logjam. To Chase, the place looked like a battlefield strewn with K rations. Tin cans had been bitten in half and packs shredded and a pair of blue jeans ripped into tatters and cans of com and spaghetti punctured and drained. Above the trail, in a depression dug into the humus beneath a spruce tree, there was a pile of trash, most of it damaged the same as the material in the campsite. Both Chases made mental notes to keep a wary eye out for bears, but they did not communicate their fears to the happy young girls. Anyway, there was little time to be afraid. There was a camp to be laid, fish to be caught, and dinner to be cooked and served.

  Susie Sampson, a 13 year-old from Kalispell, borrowed a metal lure from Chase and went off and caught herself an eight-inch cutthroat trout, which she proudly carried back into camp with all the braggadocio of a successful marlin fisherman. There were still two hours of daylight after dinner, and all the provisions were tied into a canvas sack and hauled high into a tree. Then the host and hostess and six Girl Scouts and one weary gray pony hiked a mile to the deep upper end of the lake for some more fishing. On the way back, darkness was falling, there was fresh bear sign on the trail, and the girls quickly became frightened. “Don’t worry,” Sharon Chase said. “We’ll just sing to scare them away. ” All the way back to camp the girls sang songs like “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and school songs from Kalispell, and Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Chase found themselves making as much noise as the children. In lifetimes of hiking in and out of grizzly zones, neither of the Chases had ever seen so much indication that bears were about or such clear evidence that bears had been visiting camps with impunity.

  The night was clear, and every star in the heavens made a gaudy, personal appearance. Before turning in, the girls popped com over an open fire, and in this inexact process, they charred some of it beyond edibility. They ate what they could and dumped the carbonized rejects on the ground. Then all the girls went to bed in sleeping bags with a large plastic groundsheet under them and another on top. They lay side by side in their bags like cordwood, talked till nearly midnight, and finally dropped off to sleep.

  For propriety’s sake, Jerry Chase had camped alone about fifty feet below the logjam, with Sage tied up not far away on the end of a twenty-eight-foot manny rope, and long after he had heard the last peep out of the girls, the young algebra and history teacher had been unable to find sleep.

  This was a new experience for Jerry Chase. On his own, he had camped in the middle of the deepest, wildest forests with no fear whatever. His career included terms as a bareback and bull rider in a traveling rodeo, and all through his life he had hunted big game in the deep wildernesses of the North. Once, a huge grizzly had marched straight down the snowy trail below the place where Chase’s feet were dangling from a rock, and neither the grizzly nor the hunter had swerved an inch. Another time, Chase shot a bull elk and left it to cool out overnight, and when he returned at dawn, two grizzlies had reduced the hundreds of pounds of meat to a single forequarter. Chase shooed them off.

  But this trip into Glacier Park was different Now the Chases were not only responsible for themselves, but for the six young girls camped up the trail. If there was a maverick grizzly around, it could descend on that camp and inflict heavy injuries on all the girls before they would even know what was happening, before they could make a move to defend themselves or run away. Lying in his sleeping bag, listening to the lake waters lap at the logjam, Jerry Chase remembered previous grizzly incidents in the great park. He knew that no one had ever been killed by a bear in Glacier-at least no one of record-and he also knew that the last serious injury had been four or five years before. But the laws of probabilities that he taught in his junior-high school math classes were of no consolation here in the wilderness. He remembered all the fresh sign on the trail, the tins with teeth marks in them, the torn jeans, the big pile of debris underneath the spruce tree off the trail.

  When there was this much evidence of grizzly activity, the general laws of probability lost their meaning; a whole new set of permutations and combinations took over.

  Sometime after midnight, Jerry Chase found himself sitting straight up in his sleeping bag, wondering if he had been awakened by a real noise or by his overactive imagination. There it was again, a small splash in the water just on the other side of the logjam. He had seen plenty of trout feeding on the surface at night, but this noise did not have the typical splat of a rising fish. Chase listened hard, and once again he heard an unnatural movement of water, as though something were pushing through the lake: an oar, or a hoof, or a paw. Sage whinnied loudly and began moving up and down on her long rope, and the splashing sound increased sharply. Chase jumped from his bag, grabbed his flashlight, and ran down to the lakeside. But there was a heavy haze, and he could see nothing. It took him a long time to get back to sleep.

  The girls began to stir just after dawn, and young Karen Lyons, at one end of the row, asked Sharon Chase, “Did you get up and go to the bathroom in the woods during the night?”

  Mrs. Chase said that she had not. “Well, somebody did, and they stepped on my foot,” the child said.

  Sharon Chase asked the girls one by one if they had slipped into the woods during the night, and all but one said no. The single exception was a girl who had been sleeping at the opposite end of the row from Karen Lyons. She had gotten up duri
ng the night but had not gone anywhere near Karen. Immediately, the girls concluded that a bear had invaded the camp and stepped on Karen Lyons, and all the cajoling and joking of the elder couple could not kid them out of it. The fact that the charred popcorn had disappeared from the ground did not help to calm matters, and when someone said, “Look, the ground squirrels could have done that,” someone else said, “Yeah, and so could the grizzlies.”

  The day was spent on tenterhooks. Some of the girls went fishing, but Susie Sampson and one of her friends stayed near the camp all day. Once they made a tentative foray out toward the center of the logjam, but they had hardly set foot on the bleached tamarack trunks when they both jumped a foot; a long reddish animal had appeared from a chink in the logs ahead of them, and now it was telling them off in a loud chatter and flashing its bright white teeth. The girls jumped to another log and ran back to the camp, but their excited description of the animal did not add up to anything that jerry Chase could identify. “Probably an otter,” the teacher said, “or maybe a marten, nothing to worry about.” The girls were not satisfied with this information, and they steadfastly refused to approach the logjam anymore.

  By three o’clock, all the girls were assembled in the camp; there were dozens of minor miracles to be seen in the woods around them and dozens of things to be accomplished by Girl Scouts here in the park, but they did not have the heart for anything except staying around the adults and the fire. It was early for dinner, but the girls held a democratic council and decided that they had no further interest in Trout Lake. They had intended to stay three days, but now they decided to hike out to civilization as soon as they finished the steaks that jean Gillespie had brought. Perhaps some other time...

  After dinner, the girls busied themselves assembling their packs. Pat Sampson, Susie’s twin, yanked on a rope that led to the manny bag hanging high in a tree, but the knot stuck and the canvas bag would not come down. Pat was the athletic type, and without being asked, she shimmied straight up the tree and began working on the jammed knot. “OK bear,” she shouted from twenty feet up, “I’m ready for you now!”

  Somebody on the ground said, “very funny.”

  When the knot was undone, Pat slid down the tree like a fire fighter, and just as she hit the ground, she lifted a shaking finger and pointed toward the tree where the pony was tied and almost screamed, “There he is!”

  Jerry Chase thought that the kidding had gone far enough, and he started to admonish the child when something caught his eye from the direction in which she was pointing. He turned and saw a brownish bear with silver tipped mane, creeping up on the dozing pony. “Yeah,” he said in a soft voice, “there he is, and he’s a grizzly!”

  The bear was almost upon Sage when the gray pony bolted and dashed to the end of its tether toward the lake. The bear reared up and dropped down, in one continuous motion, and took after the pony on all fours. Sage waited till the bear was almost upon her again, and then sidestepped nimbly and ran past the grizzly to the opposite end of her twenty-eight-foot rope. She stood on top of a little bench and pawed the ground and whinnied with terror, but instead of giving chase again, the bear stopped at the pony’s saddle blanket, sat down, and began gnawing on it.

  “Get up the hill!” Chase shouted, and the six members of Girl Scout Troop 367, ·accompanied by Sharon Chase, scrambled up the slope behind the trail. When they had gone thirty or forty feet, they stopped and looked. Jerry was running toward his pony, and the bear was dining on the scraps of hashed-brown potatoes left over from dinner. “Never mind the bear!” Sharon Chase said. “Find trees!” But they were in the part of the woods where the trees were either stunted or lacked branches on the lower trunks, and not all the girls could climb straight up like Pat Sampson. So the group stayed together and ran farther up the hillside till they had put about fifty feet between them and the bear, which by now was munching away on everything in sight in the campground. All the packs had been placed in a neat line against the side of a fallen tree, and one by one the bear was opening them. In one, it found an apple and devoured it in a gulp. In another pack, it found a baby-food jar of jelly and chewed and swallowed the whole thing, including the glass.

  Jerry Chase came running up the slope below the girls just as the bear turned to an expensive pack that had been borrowed from a doctor in Kalispell. As the bear stuck a claw into the sixty-dollar pack, one of the girls lost her temper and threw a rock at the animal. When the grizzly showed no signs of resentment, the whole group began throwing, but the stones did not seem to have the slightest effect. Jerry Chase picked up a rock almost too heavy to carry, crept to within twenty feet of the bear, and slammed it into the animal’s thin ribs. The grizzly woofed once and kept on eating. From her position higher on the hill, Sharon Chase threw smaller stones, and when one of them caught the bear full in the nose, it jumped up and retreated toward the logjam, pawing at its face. After only a few seconds, it dashed off the logs and headed up the hill toward its tormentors.

  Jerry Chase grabbed a handful of rocks and told the girls that he would hold off the bear while they circled back to the campsite and salvaged what was left for a hurried trip out. The bear was quartering the brush toward the girls, and the girls were circling away and working down toward the camp. Chase intruded himself in the middle and began pelting the bear with stones. As the girls reached the camp and grabbed what was left, the schoolteacher and the bear reached the main trail that paralleled the lakeshore, alternately chasing each other. The man would hit the bear in a tender spot, and the animal would race up the trail toward Arrow Lake, but as soon as the teacher got close enough for his next salvo, the bear would come woofing down the trail at him. In this yoyo fashion, man and bear reached a point about 150 yards from the camp, where the lake trail made a slight tum, when all at once the bear seemed to tire of the game and charged at full speed. The brave schoolteacher stood his ground and let fire several rocks, but the grizzly hesitated only slightly, and Chase fled all the way back to the camp. As he did, he saw the bear above him on the trail disappearing toward a thicket by the logjam. “He’s gone!” Chase hollered. “Let’s get out of here!” He had thrown a saddle on the pony and started tying on the manny bag when his wife shouted, “Here he comes again!” The grizzly had reappeared on the trail below the logjam.

  Sharon said, “I’ll try and hold him off while you tie the bag.”

  With her husband yanking feverishly on the ropes, Sharon Chase walked toward the bear and threw a small rock. The animal stopped and studied the scene of frenzied activity less than fifty feet away and then calmly lay down on the trail.

  Sharon returned to the group, and the bear continued watching them, resting its head on its forepaws like a puppy. The pony rolled her eyes back in their sockets and pulled against her tether, and Sharon tried to hold the frightened animal by the halter, but the movements were too strong for her. “I can’t hold her!” she shouted, and Chase said, “Take the girls and get out!”

  The troop ran ahead, followed by the man and the lurching pony, and as soon as the area was cleared of humans, the grizzly pulled itself slowly to its feet and started across the end of the logjam toward the camp. By now, it was plain that the animal was more interested in food scraps than Girl Scouts, and Susie Sampson felt safe enough to pull out her Kodak Instamatic and snap a picture from the crest of the hill that led downtrail to safety.

  It was dark, and the group was exhausted when the dirt road around Lake McDonald finally came into view. There was talk about stopping and reporting the affair to the local ranger, but Jerry Chase failed to see the point. “They can read,” he said, “and they’ve seen all those remarks on the trail register by now. We’d just be telling them something they already know.”

  When the group got back to Kalispell, thirty miles south of Glacier Park, Susie Sampson told her regular scout leader that they had seen a grizzly bear. “Oh, come on,” the woman said, and laughed. But then Susie took her roll of film to the Daily Inter La
ke, Kalispell’s only daily newspaper, and on Thursday, August 10, 1967, a picture of the Trout Lake bear appeared on page l. The next day, a hard-driving newspaperman went to Glacier Park to peddle his papers and have a few words with some of his friends, the ranger officials. Mel Ruder, holder of a master’s degree in sociology, had been reporting, writing, photographing, editing, proofreading, and selling the local news for twenty-two years, and his weekly Hungry Horse News had won more plaques and trophies than there was room for in the tiny office in Columbia Falls. Ruder had won the Pulitzer Prize two years earlier for his reporting of a flood that inundated Glacier Park, but the prize changed nothing in his life. He still worked twelve hours a day, Monday through Friday, and then spent weekends taking photographs for the next week’s paper with his old-fashioned Speed Graphic camera; he still sold his own advertising, and he still ran around the county every Friday afternoon with fresh-run copies of the Hungry Horse News under his arm, planting them in dispensers and giving away as many as he sold.

  “They know me up in the park,” Ruder said with studied understatement later, “and I love to mind their business for them. I’ve been around here longer than any of the rangers, and I tell them off, and they like me and I like them. We can speak frankly.”

  On this day, Ruder told anyone in headquarters who would listen, including the superintendent, that a dangerous situation had developed at Trout Lake. “Just look at the facts,” Ruder said as he collared one ranger executive. “This bear’s been around all summer. People have written about him. I wrote about him myself the other day when he chased Steve Ashlock and John Cook. And now that bear’s not only being written about, but its picture is running in the Inter Lake!”