Underestimating Jim Cole

Few people would say I actually owe Jim Cole an apology, but in my heart I know I do. Have never said anything bad about him. Was never discourteous or mean to him. What I did do was seriously underestimate Jim's energy, his dedication, and his talent.

Most of us can't help being curious about things that don't necessarily concern us: but I think news reporters reach a point in their life where they get to feeling they have a right to pry into almost everything. I'm that way.

Last summer I met a couple of women running around with funny looking cardboard containers at Many Glacier. Did not hesitate one minute to say, "Ladies, I hope you'll excuse me but I'm a snoopy reporter and I can't help asking what you are doing." They were scientists doing a study on bad moths, and they were eager to tell me about it. Events like this automatically enforce the idea a reporter can snoop into everything. After all these years, the concept is so imbedded with me I feel it is "my duty" to be snoopy.

That's the way it was the first time I met Jim Cole in the backcountry of Glacier Park. Maybe he was sitting under a bush on Mt. Wilber, or perhaps lying on a rock above Grinnell Overlook. During the last 20 or 30 years I've seen that guy in so many places they all run together. From day one I was prying and snoopy. "Nice to meet you Jim. What are you doing up here?"

He was always pleasant but sort of evasive. Said he was studying grizzly bears and things, but my most prying questions about whom he worked for were not clearly answered. He would have certainly been justified to say, "Ostrom! It's none of your damn business," but he never did that. On several occasions he helped me and my companions to see a far off grizzly or band of bighorns. One time he told me he was helping pay expenses while studying the griz by working the summer at Granite Park Chalet.

The facts are, I envied him. Here was a fella spending his life doing what I could only do once a week, but I did have doubts about how serious "his studies" were, and if he'd ever had a "day job."

Had a little "column" fun with Jim in 1993 when he got chewed on by a grizzly far back on the Highline Trail to Fifty Mountain. The way the story first came to us from Park sources was that Jim was attacked and his companion hesitated for a few seconds to use pepper spray on the bear for fear of "getting some" on Jim. My column on the matter said we called an immediate meeting of the Over the Hill Gang to clearly establish course of action if that ever happened to one of us.

Well remember the last time I ran into Jim. It was late summer of 2003 and I was crouched in the bushes on the shore of Fishercap Lake taking pictures of a mother moose and her two calves. Quite a bit of smoke had drifted over the Continental Divide. From somewhere there came Jim Cole. We talked for a while but I didn't ask him if he'd found work. He passed up the opportunity to join me because, "The light is not right."

Last summer a beautiful photo book was published by Farcountry Press called "The Lives of Grizzlies: Montana and Wyoming." It is far beyond being just a "good book." The Great Falls Tribune called it "unprecedented photography of grizzlies in their natural habitat," and that is only half the story. Cole's accompanying narrative covers the individuality of the great bears, along with deep insight into their daily lives ranging from playtime to life and death time.

For anyone seriously interested in learning about and understanding these majestic creatures this is . . . "THE BOOK."

Jim Cole! If I might have thought a time or two that you were just goofing off up there in those mountains, I was wrong . . . and I apologize.