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Few people can tell a story like Doug Follett.

At 90 years old, “Ranger Doug” recently wrapped up his 55th season as an interpretive ranger in Glacier National Park, a career that follows his stints as a railroad worker, a high school history teacher, a World War II Air Force veteran (he was preparing to head to Europe when Truman ordered to drop the bomb) and two years as what he calls a “professional hitchhiker.”

Follett shows few signs of slowing down. He continues to lead hikes on the park’s west side during the summer and write poetry in his spare time.

He said he’s ready to take whatever may come, but retirement isn’t on his mind just yet.

“I’ll never know until it’s over,” Follett said. “It’s like my friend Victor says — you will be shot out of the saddle.”

Glacier is known for its dramatic, ice-hewn landscapes of towering mountains, dense forests and rare wildlife, but what Follett loves most are the visitors.

“I was born in the mountains; I got to take all the grandeur of the national parks for granted,” Follett said. “All the people who come to see it are different. From the littlest to the most famous, they’re all equal.”

Although he was born in Fernie, British Columbia, Follett’s family moved to Whitefish when he was 1 year old. Stumptown was a very different place during the Depression Era, and Follett remembers when the town’s first stop sign was installed at the intersection of Second Street and Baker Avenue.

“It was an indicator that wild-and-free Whitefish was ending, and someone was putting up signs and barbed wire,” Follett said.

Back then, Whitefish was a true railroad town, and his father was a career Great Northern Railway employee. Follett worked at the depot for several summers and remembers going to Whitefish Lake to help cut ice to be placed in rail cars in the era before modern air conditioning.

After his father took a job working at the train depot in East Glacier, Follett would frequently accompany his mother to the station, where the town’s residents would gather to watch the travelers disembark.

“You saw all the strangers walking up and down the platform, and it was our way to touch the outer world,” he said.

Louis W. Hill, the storied president of the Great Northern at the time, would arrange for groups of Blackfeet Indians to also greet the incoming visitors, and Follett remembers how his mother would let them pick him up and gently bounce him in their arms.

One time, his mother got a rebuke from some women visiting from the East Coast, who told her, “Little girl, you should not let those people do that — they might steal him.”

According to Follett, his mother quipped, “If you look around, they have plenty of their own kids, and they’re better-looking than that one.”

Follett worked alongside crews building Hungry Horse Dam in the late 1940s, then stayed on as a tour guide for 11 years after it opened.

During that time, he got to know legendary Hungry Horse News editor Mel Ruder, who talked the superintendent of Glacier National Park into offering a new interpretive ranger position to him.

At the time, Follett didn’t expect to spend the next six decades working in the park, instead viewing it more as a way to make ends meet in the summer during his 35-year career teaching American history at Columbia Falls High School.

Growing up at a time when much of Northwest Montana was just as wild and untrammeled as Glacier is today, he didn’t experience quite the same level of astonishment that characterizes most folks’ first visit to the park.

But as the Flathead Valley and other areas around Glacier became increasingly full of people and “barbed wire,” it was the idea itself, of preserving parks, that captivated Follett.

“The national parks are symbols of what other aspects of American government should be,” he said. “They are places where people can have a once-in-a-lifetime experience and believe in what it stands for.”

Among those who Follett has hosted include luminaries like Robin Williams and former President George W. Bush, but it’s the less famous visitors he remembers most fondly.

One little girl showed him a variation on the fist-bump — a useful greeting given the difficulty his arthritis present to handshakes, and one he’s since given to thousands of visitors to Glacier.

“Here’s this little thing who showed me that, and I have spread it to people all around the world,” Follett said. “You never know the effect you’ll have on all the people you come into contact with. ... The responsibility of wondering what effects you’ve had on the rest of the world is great.”