Night of the grizzlies - 40 years later

By HEIDI DESCH

Hungry Horse News

No one suspected that anything like it was possible.

Not until tragedy actually struck on Aug. 13, 1967 in Glacier National Park.

Two young women were mauled and killed by two different grizzly bears in two separate locations in the Park.

Monday marks the 40th anniversary of the night that would become known ominously as the "night of the grizzlies."

Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons went into the Park's backcountry and by the morning of Aug. 13 would be victims of grizzly attacks.

Helgeson, 19, of Albert Lea, Minn., had hiked the Highline Trail into Granite Park Chalet with her friend, 18-year-old Roy Ducat of Perrysburg, Ohio. Helgeson had been working in the laundry at East Glacier Lodge that summer.

The pair set up at the Granite Park campground about 500 yards from the Chalet.

At the Chalet, hikers gathered regularly to watch a sort of "grizzly show" each night when bears raided garbage containers at nearby dumps.

That night, Helgeson and Ducat were asleep when a bear hit them with a paw. It bit into Ducat's arm then moved onto Helgeson.

Helgeson was drug away from the camp site and Ducat looked for help.

Ducat was later treated at the Chalet and air-lifted out.

A search party from the Chalet would find Helgeson badly hurt. She suffered puncture wounds to her right and left thorax as well as extensive damage to her right arm.

She was treated at the Chalet, but died there.

Koons, 19, of San Diego, Calif., hiked into Trout Lake with four fellow college students taking a weekend break from their summer Park jobs. Koons was working for the summer in the gift shop at Lake McDonald Lodge.

About 4:30 a.m., a grizzly clawed or bit at several of the campers.

All but Koons, who was zipped in her mummy bag, were able to climb trees to safety.

Witnesses reported that the woman screamed one or two times as she was dragged off into the dark.

It had been a summer of heat and dry lightning had sparked several fires. That combined with the amount of garbage in the backcountry campgrounds has been theorized as one of the causes of the events.

But the exact why and how the attacks could have happened in one night remains somewhat of a mystery.

At Going-to-the-Sun Road

Bert Gildart was driving the Sun Road that night, transporting a caterpillar over the road to be used in firefighting efforts.

That's when Gildart got a call on the radio.

"I got a call from Granite Park saying they had a mauling, but couldn't reach headquarters," he said.

Gildart happened to be in the perfect spot to serve as relay between the two locations. He halted the convoy he was with and relayed messages.

"Five minutes seemed like an eternity at that time," he said.

After 40 years, the messages are somewhat fuzzy, but he remembers that at some point whether it was him or after the Chalet established contact with headquarters that medical supplies were called for.

He would continue onto West Glacier where it would be five hours before he was awakened and told about a second mauling.

The same night

Dave Shea, a backcountry ranger at the time, was camped at Miche Wabun Lake on the east side of the Park that night. He would be one of several rangers sent to the Chalet after the incident. The rangers went to kill the bear involved in the attack.

Shea, who was 27 at the time, was working as a seasonal ranger out of the Belly River district of the Park.

"I remember that night distinctly because there was a big lightning storm that night," he said.

Shea had hiked out to the Belly River Ranger Station the day after the attacks. That's when he heard what had happened.

"It was almost hard to believe because before that it had never happened and then to have two in one night," he said.

Shea immediately went to park headquarters, where he was sent to the chalet two days after the attack. He was with five other people from the park service.

He said going in "wasn't a real pleasant situation." Most people had left the chalet, but the workers were still there.

It was his job along with the other rangers and biologists to shoot the grizzly that had killed Helgeson. Shea is a wildlife biologist and at that time taught during the winter at a college in Coos Bay, Ore.

"We had to make sure everything was OK and that no more bears would come into the chalet," he said.

Shea and the others sat on the chalet's back porch and waited for the bears to arrive. He said he spent three days at the chalet.

"That was interesting," he said. "We would take turns watching at night from the back balcony waiting for the bears to come back to get garbage and then shoot them."

Three grizzlies were killed, a sow with two cubs.

Shea said the sow was the one that killed Helgeson.

The chalet crew had been drawing the bears in with garbage. Bears would come to the chalet and feed at night while guests watched.

"The one bear had obviously been eating garbage," said Shea. "It had fragments of glass in its teeth."

At the Lake McDonald Ranger Station

Leonard Landa, the Lake McDonald Ranger at the time, spent the night in his cabin listening to the Park radio. He heard Granite Park Calet report the mauling there. Landa, 26, was in his third summer as a seasonal ranger at the Park.

Then early the next morning the young campers who had been with Koons at Trout Lake came to the station.

"I was probably like most people — it was almost like can this really be happening," he said. "My first thought was 'is this the same bear?' We didn't know if they had shot the one at Granite, but at the same time there was also too much distance for the bear to cover."

At Park headquarters

Gildart was just wiping away the haze of sleep when he was told about a mauling in the Park.

"I was woken up and they said they wanted me to go out and investigate a possible mauling," he said. "I said 'but it's already been taken care of.'"

In fact, Gildart was being sent to a second mauling at Trout Lake.

"I couldn't believe there had been a second possible mauling in a four- or five-hour period of time, he said.

He immediately headed over Howe Ridge up to Trout Lake.

When he got there he met up with Landa.

"We spread out and searched for the body," said Gildart.

They were about 30 feet apart walking along the lake.

Landa said he remembers finding pieces of the girl's sleeping bag and what was clothes or a jacket.

Then Landa found an ear. Next a body.

"The bear had chewed off an ear. It was laying on the trail," said Landa. "It wasn't a very pleasant experience. She had been pretty significantly mauled."

The rangers then put the girl into a body bag and loaded her into a helicopter.

Next they were instructed to make sure every hiker was out of the valley and safe.

"We found a couple of people and gave them an armed escort out," said Gildart.

Headquarters then told them to find the bear and dispose of it. It was three days after the attack when orders came in.

Gildart said they hiked back to Arrow Lake patrol cabin to spend the night. It's about 2.5 miles from Trout lake.

"The next morning I got up about 5 a.m. and there was the bear. It was 40 feet away on the lip of a creek and it kept going up and down looking around," said Gildart.

He called for Landa and the rifles.

"We waited for it to look up again and then we shot him," said Gildart. "Both were fatal shots. It levitated and landed in the creek."

The bear was examined and found to be the one that killed Koons.

"It had no unusual disease, but it had glass in its teeth," he said. "It was a 19-year-old sow that had been such a problem all throughout the summer."

It was a few days later that Gildart flew back into the lake and helped clean up garbage there.

"We filled seven to eight burlap sacks with garbage," said Gildart. "It was a mess."