One by one, the campers jumped and climbed up trees. It sniffed around, biting into one of the young men’s sleeping bags and clawing his sweatshirt. In a ring around a campfire, they settled into their sleeping bags.Īt about 4:30 a.m., the grizzly reappeared at Koons’ camp. The party moved their gear, bringing some cookies and Cheez-Its, to the beach. The campers ran and waited as the bear gobbled up their dinner and scrambled away with one of their backpacks. A grizzly crashed their campsite at about 8 p.m. but died soon thereafter, minutes before the aircraft landed.Īs Helgelson departed on her fateful hike, Koons was joining four fellow park employees on a steep eight-mile journey to Trout Lake. The group carried her back to the chalet, where a helicopter would arrive to take her to a hospital. A doctor staying at the chalet attended to her. Soon, they heard a noise and spotted Helgeson facedown, not far below. After Ducat was taken to a hospital, and a ranger armed with a rifle had arrived, the group followed a blood trail downhill from the campsite.Ī contemporary view of the Granite Park Chalet. Nearly two hours passed before the group departed on its mission to rescue Helgeson. Help arrived for Ducat in the form of a helicopter with medical supplies, but an overly cautious ranger held up the search party, fearful of putting more visitors at risk. Ducat, his arm badly mangled, ran to wake other campers nearby. “Someone help us!” she screamed as the bear dragged her off. It focused on Helgeson, dragging her about 100 yards away. The grizzly knocked the pair out of their sleeping bags and within minutes, the bear had sunk its teeth into each of them. Shortly after midnight, a grizzly bear meandered toward the campers.ĭucat would later tell investigators Helgelson had seen the bear and woke Ducat telling him to play dead. Helgeson and Ducat tucked into their sleeping bags outside, near the chalet, packed with guests during the busy summer season. She and a friend, Roy Ducat, arrived at about 7 p.m., ate their sack dinners and watched the sunset before retiring for the night. Her excursion took her from Logan Pass, roughly eight miles up the popular Highline Trail to the Granite Park Chalet. Helgeson’s path was surrounded by vistas of glacial valleys and mountain peaks. Both were spending a summer working in one of the park’s lodges, Helgeson in East Glacier Lodge, Koons in West Glacier’s Lake McDonald Lodge. On August 12, 1967, Helgelson and Koons-both 19 at the time-embarked on respective overnight backpacking trips. “Night of the Grizzlies,” as the events came to be known, “was really the wake up call,” he says. The park quickly overhauled its practices and implemented precautions that are still in use today. But it wasn’t until after the summer of 1967 that the agency recognized a need for dramatic changes in official park policy. John Waller, a current supervisory wildlife biologist for the park, says the park service had known for a long time that feeding bears was unsafe. And in the summer of 1967, as forest fires drove bears further into populated areas, it was clear to some rangers that bears were living dangerously close to people. Littering was common and campsites overflowed with garbage that attracted animals. In Glacier Park and in other parks nationwide, the lessons of that summer live on in warning signs, rules and policies created to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to tragedy 50 years ago.īefore then, the park service neglected to close trails where bear sightings were frequent. The shocking attacks ushered in a new era for the National Park Service’s management of bears. Two 19-year-olds, Julie Helgeson, from Minnesota, and Michele Koons, from California, were both asleep under the big sky of northwest Montana, when grizzly bears found them and carried them off.ĭetailed in National Park Service reports and Jack Olsen’s 1969 book Night of the Grizzlies, these incidents marked Glacier’s first fatal bear maulings. Several miles apart, each bear had mauled a young woman on the same day, in the dark, early hours of August 13. In a matter of hours, two grizzly bears had acted as they never had before in the park’s 57-year history. Glacier National Park’s busiest season came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 1967.
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