Introduction by Gene Estensen
The headline caught my attention earlier today. "The night two women were killed by bears..."
I knew the story immediately. You see, I have the book and I have been to the location where they were killed.
One of the best hikes in America leads to the Chalet where one of the girls was killed, with plenty of onlookers. The hike is the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park. It was 8 or 9 miles to the Chalet, a long hike in the beautiful mountains. However, I was not going to camp out there in Grizzly country so I hiked back. A long day.
Along the way I took my best picture ever. I climbed over 1/2 mile to take it:
Below is the full article on the deaths of the two girls. But first, here is a video of the hike to the glacier pictured above. Here is a look at one of the best hikes in America. It is not for the faint-hearted.
Now for the article:
The night two women were killed by bears 10 miles apart in Glacier National Park
By Katie Dowd
Oct 3, 2023
At first, the bear came only for the hot dogs. Although shocking, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. On the trek down to Trout Lake in Glacier National Park, a group of co-eds encountered two hikers. The hikers warned the group that they’d been chased up a tree by a bear earlier. The bear eventually moved on, and they were high-tailing it back to civilization.
If the crew was alarmed, they weren’t deterred. They, like many young people in the Montana park in 1967, were there for just a few months, working jobs in hotels and camps while on summer break. On a night off work, five of them packed up food and sleeping bags for an overnight stay by the lake. As they made camp and cooked their hot dog dinner, 19-year-old Michele Koons of San Diego gasped. There’s a bear,” she pointed.
For a moment, they all watched each other. Then, the bear charged. The group scattered as the animal ripped through their dinner. Satisfied, it lumbered back into the woods.
“We discussed whether to stay where we were or try to go back,” one survivor would later recount. “It was dark, and we weren’t sure of the trail, so we built a big bonfire.” It was a sleepless night. Although they snuggled in their sleeping bags for warmth, no one could drift off. In the distance, they could see the bear standing on a pile of logs in the lake, waiting.
Around 2 a.m., Denise Huckle’s dog Squirt growled. Huckle heard a splash as the bear left its perch in the lake and drew closer to them. Branches snapped, and bushes rustled. The sounds came and went for the next two hours. Suddenly, Squirt began to yelp.
“I looked over a log and the bear was loping straight toward the camp,” Huckle told the Associated Press. “The fire was big and I could see his face and the upper half of his body. Then about four or five feet from me, he stopped.”
Huckle held her breath as the bear approached her, sniffing as it went. Nearby, 16-year-old Paul Dunn heard the crunch first; a second later, he realized the bear was chewing through his sleeping bag. “I lifted up the covers and hit him,” he said. “He reared back on his hind legs.”
The teenagers ran. As they scrambled into the trees, they heard Koons utter a harrowing cry: “He’s ripping my arm!” They begged her to get in the tree with them, but Koons was stuck in her sleeping bag. “He’s got the zipper,” she screamed. “Oh my God, I’m dead.”
When the sun set on Aug. 13, 1967, no one had ever been killed by a bear at Glacier National Park, which was established in 1910. By sunrise the next day, two women were dead.
About four hours before Koons was dragged into the woods, 19-year-old Julie Helgeson was camping 10 miles away with her friend Roy Ducat. The pair had met while working summer jobs in the park; Helgeson, who was from Minnesota, worked at a hotel laundry. The two were sleeping outside near Granite Park Chalet when, without warning, a grizzly bear launched itself onto Helgeson. As she fought back, it turned to Ducat, who managed to get away. The bear then returned to Helgeson, grabbing her and dragging her 400 feet into the darkness. Stumbling and bleeding, Ducat ran for help. As reports came in, park rangers thought confused visitors were talking about the same attack. But in short order, they sorted out the unbelievable truth: Two different bears had attacked and killed two different young women in a single night.
Park officials were stunned. “We can’t understand it,” Glacier National Park superintendent Keith Neilson told reporters. “There is no scarcity of natural food. We have a smaller huckleberry crop than usual, but that’s a small item in the bear diet.” Neilson speculated the two bears could have been triggered by anything from the weather (“There is a faint possibility that a lot of lightning strikes in those two areas recently have alarmed the bears”) to women being more appealing to bears due to their menstrual cycles (“We are convinced it definitely is a factor”).
But in between all the farfetched speculation, rangers continually mentioned, almost in passing, the actual problem. A day after the killings, the AP noted there were “several reports this summer in the Trout Lake area of bears invading camps for food.” When Ducat was well enough to do interviews from his hospital bed, he said the same. “There was talk about bears,” he told the Daily Inter Lake, “and we knew they came up the valley behind the lodge to feed on the garbage.”
Time and again, rangers heard stories about increasingly bold bears approaching campsites for food. In one instance, they learned that park visitors were throwing food to the waiting bears. With hindsight, it couldn’t be more obvious: The bears were habituated to humans and accustomed to getting food from them. It was only a matter of time before the very dangerous wild animals had a violent encounter with the humans encroaching on their territory.
With bears present in nearly every U.S. state, if you go to almost any national park today, you’ll see all manner of preventive measures: bear-proof trash cans, warnings on trails and even full closures when bears return habitually to a spot looking for food. None of this existed before the twin deaths in August 1967. On the year anniversary of the tragedy, Montana newspapers ran stories about how Glacier had changed over the previous 12 months.
Rangers passed out fliers, put up signs on trailheads and talked with campers about the dangers of feeding wildlife. They taught people how to pack in and pack out and encouraged people to separate food and sleeping areas. Bear-resistant garbage cans were introduced all over the park, and at least one ranger was assigned to the backcountry to continually monitor the cleanliness of campsites.
“Park rangers and naturalists recognize that this awareness would have prevented the tragedy at Trout Lake last summer,” the Missoulian wrote.
They also introduced a measure that will sound familiar today. Bears that became too acclimatized to humans were tranquilized and relocated to other parts of the park. If they continued to return, rangers could arrange to re-home them at a zoo; in the worst cases, the bears were put down.
It is exceedingly rare for a human to be killed by a bear, and when it does happen, it tends to be international news. Over the weekend, officials in Banff National Park in Canada announced two backcountry campers were killed by a grizzly bear on Friday. Two days later, a woman walking near Glacier National Park close to the Canadian border was mauled by a bear; her husband used bear spray to scare off the animal, and the woman survived. Both attacks prompted closures in the parks.
According to Yellowstone’s official website, the odds of being attacked by a grizzly bear while visiting the park are 1 in 2.7 million.
