The Night of the Grizzlies: August Thirteenth, Nineteen Sixty-Seven

Granite Park Chalet sits above the treeline at the end of the Highline Trail, a stone building perched at the edge of a cirque where, in the summer of nineteen sixty-seven, Glacier National Park was running its backcountry food storage the same way it had for decades. Bears came to the garbage dump below the chalet in the evenings. Rangers considered this normal. Some visitors considered it entertainment.

On the night of August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-seven, two young women were killed by grizzly bears in separate incidents in Glacier National Park, on the same night, in different locations miles apart. Julie Helgeson, who was nineteen years old, was attacked near Granite Park Chalet. Michele Koons, also nineteen, was killed at Trout Lake. The two incidents, occurring simultaneously in the same park, stunned the country in a way that a single attack, however devastating, might not have.

The response within the National Park Service was significant and lasting. Before that night, open garbage dumps where bears fed were common across the American national park system. Backcountry food practices were casual, by modern standards dangerously so. The events of August thirteenth set in motion a complete rethinking of bear management, dump closure, food storage requirements, and the fundamental premise that bears and human food waste should be kept apart.

Author Jack Olsen documented the events in a nineteen sixty-nine book titled Night of the Grizzlies, which became a widely read case study in wildlife management and the relationship between parks and their apex predators. The book's reach carried the story well beyond the National Park Service into the public conversation about what parks owe their visitors and what they owe their wildlife.

The canister in your pack, the food hang you made last night, the ranger's warning at the trailhead this morning: all of it traces back to what happened here, on this ridge, in August of sixty-seven.