Exactly 43 years ago, on a hot August day much like this one, two young women with summer jobs at Glacier National Park set off on camping trips from which they never returned.
By sunrise the next morning, college students Julie Helgeson, from Albert Lea, Minn., and Michele Koons, from San Diego, were dead — fatally mauled by grizzly bears eight miles apart, on opposite sides of the Continental Divide. Since its creation in 1910, Glacier Park had never recorded a fatal bear attack. Then, on a single night in 1967, there were two.
The story of that night is retold in a documentary that recently aired (and is being rebroadcast tonight) on MontanaPBS. It offers lessons that can help us address our own wildlife issues today.
Earlier this summer, two small children were injured in separate attacks by coyotes in suburban Rye, N.Y., just a few miles from New York City. Black bears regularly invade backyards all over the country. Eight years ago, a black bear grabbed a 5-month-old infant from a stroller on her family’s porch in New York’s Catskills. The child died.
In the six decades between 1910 and 1969, there were only three reported fatalities from mountain lion attacks in all of North America. Since 1970 there have been 18, including a 5-year-old who was killed in 1989 while riding his tricycle near my old college town of Missoula, Mont. When my friends and I hiked those same Missoula forests during my 1970s college days, we would have been less surprised to meet Sasquatch than to encounter a mountain lion. The most recent lion death was an infant attacked in Alberta last February.
“A fed bear is a dead bear.” The National Park Service tries to drum this slogan into the head of every tourist who sets foot in bear country nowadays. Animals that associate humans with food lose their natural wariness. If the creature is big and dangerous enough to do us harm, it eventually must be destroyed.
Bear management was far more lax back in 1967, even though some biologists could see trouble was coming. Julie Helgeson set off that fateful day on a hike to Granite Park Chalet, a small shelter high on the east side of the park’s mountains. Not long before bedtime, the chalet’s managers set out their food waste to attract bears, whose foraging was part of the evening’s entertainment.
The chalet was full, as usual at midsummer, so Helgeson and her friend Roy Ducat slept a short distance away in sleeping bags under the stars. In the middle of the night she whispered urgently to Ducat, “Play dead!” He did, as the bear battered him before turning on Helgeson. She could not stifle her cries when the bear tore into her.
On the west side of the park, an undernourished, ornery sow grizzly had spent the summer terrorizing campers and cabin owners. (Glacier Park contains some property that was in private hands before the park was created.) Michele Koons and four friends settled in for the night in a campsite at Trout Lake that held a season’s worth of litter, including excess food abandoned by previous campers who did not want to carry it back over a nearby ridge to their vehicles. Our modern “pack it in, pack it out” policy was not yet in effect.
The sow made repeated forays into their campsite that night. Koons’ companions climbed high into the nearby pine trees for safety, but she didn’t make it out of her sleeping bag before the bear grabbed her arm and dragged her off.
More than 40 years later, the survivors’ lingering trauma is obvious as they tell their stories in the documentary.
The immediate reaction after the maulings was to kill any grizzly that happened to get close to a human. But the Endangered Species Act of 1973 saved the bear, and wiser management — focusing on changing human behavior and allowing bears to be their natural selves — brought them back. The documentary reports that the northwestern Montana grizzly population, which numbered about 200 bears within Glacier Park in 1967, now is near 800 bears ranging over a broad swath of forest and wilderness extending well beyond park boundaries.
I wish I could tell you that better management has put an end to bear attacks, but that is not true and never will be true. For one thing, any female bear protecting her cubs is very dangerous, and people will inevitably stumble across mothers with cubs.
Also, bears exist at the top of the food chain, the same as us. They have no natural predators, and they will eat anything. They are smart enough to learn to be wary of humans, but without that wariness, a hungry bear may see a person as a large meal. Predatory bear attacks are rare, but they do happen.
There have been fatal grizzly attacks at Glacier National Park in 1976, 1980 (two women killed in one attack, a man killed two months later in another), 1987 (two men killed in separate attacks, including one in which the man followed a mother with cubs to photograph the bears), 1992 and 1998. Attacks also regularly happen elsewhere. There have been two deaths this summer, both near Yellowstone National Park, with one fatality at a Montana campground and one in Wyoming.
There were 200 million people in this country in 1967; today there are more than 300 million. Wildlife populations likewise have increased in many areas. More people plus more critters equals more encounters.
In the case of the coyote, the species was virtually unknown in the East before 1950. Now it is widely distributed, and eastern coyotes have crossbred with wolves in Canada. These are large and potentially dangerous creatures. Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell was killed by a pair of coyotes in Nova Scotia last year. This summer’s incidents in New York demonstrate that eastern coyotes are a real hazard, even in densely populated areas.
Why are coyotes moving into the suburbs? Because food is abundant there. Eastern coyotes will hunt deer, which have overrun many areas. But they will take easier prey when possible, including house cats left outdoors. This habituates the coyotes to think of human communities as a food source. A pair of coyotes might enter a backyard looking for a cat, but upon finding a small child playing alone, they may opportunistically attack.
It is only a matter of time before a child is killed. In the meantime, we should adopt and strictly enforce rules against letting pets run loose, and we urgently need to thin suburban deer herds, despite the objections of misguided animal-rights defenders. This is not a question of protecting cats or deer; it is about protecting children. The coyotes likewise must be hunted or trapped out of densely populated areas. Naturally, places like Rye are not suitable for recreational hunting, so this will need to be done by professionals.
In bear country — which is a lot of country these days — people need to secure their garbage and eliminate backyard food sources like bird feeders and fruit trees. Bears eat everything we eat and a lot of things we don’t. Remove the food sources and the bears will stay in the woods.
In November 1974, shortly after I started college, I camped with a group of students at Kintla Lake in the northwestern corner of Glacier Park. It had been a long Indian summer, and the first light snowfall came that weekend. Our campsite was spotless. We cached all our food in a backpack that we hoisted into a tree far from our tents, and we left nothing edible in our van.
On Sunday we returned to the vehicle to find bear prints in the snow on its roof. We had been examined, found to be uninteresting, and left alone.
In Glacier National Park, at least, the lessons of the night of the grizzlies had been learned and successfully applied.
Posted by Larry M. Elkin, CPA, CFP®
Exactly 43 years ago, on a hot August day much like this one, two young women with summer jobs at Glacier National Park set off on camping trips from which they never returned.
By sunrise the next morning, college students Julie Helgeson, from Albert Lea, Minn., and Michele Koons, from San Diego, were dead — fatally mauled by grizzly bears eight miles apart, on opposite sides of the Continental Divide. Since its creation in 1910, Glacier Park had never recorded a fatal bear attack. Then, on a single night in 1967, there were two.
The story of that night is retold in a documentary that recently aired (and is being rebroadcast tonight) on MontanaPBS. It offers lessons that can help us address our own wildlife issues today.
Earlier this summer, two small children were injured in separate attacks by coyotes in suburban Rye, N.Y., just a few miles from New York City. Black bears regularly invade backyards all over the country. Eight years ago, a black bear grabbed a 5-month-old infant from a stroller on her family’s porch in New York’s Catskills. The child died.
In the six decades between 1910 and 1969, there were only three reported fatalities from mountain lion attacks in all of North America. Since 1970 there have been 18, including a 5-year-old who was killed in 1989 while riding his tricycle near my old college town of Missoula, Mont. When my friends and I hiked those same Missoula forests during my 1970s college days, we would have been less surprised to meet Sasquatch than to encounter a mountain lion. The most recent lion death was an infant attacked in Alberta last February.
“A fed bear is a dead bear.” The National Park Service tries to drum this slogan into the head of every tourist who sets foot in bear country nowadays. Animals that associate humans with food lose their natural wariness. If the creature is big and dangerous enough to do us harm, it eventually must be destroyed.
Bear management was far more lax back in 1967, even though some biologists could see trouble was coming. Julie Helgeson set off that fateful day on a hike to Granite Park Chalet, a small shelter high on the east side of the park’s mountains. Not long before bedtime, the chalet’s managers set out their food waste to attract bears, whose foraging was part of the evening’s entertainment.
The chalet was full, as usual at midsummer, so Helgeson and her friend Roy Ducat slept a short distance away in sleeping bags under the stars. In the middle of the night she whispered urgently to Ducat, “Play dead!” He did, as the bear battered him before turning on Helgeson. She could not stifle her cries when the bear tore into her.
On the west side of the park, an undernourished, ornery sow grizzly had spent the summer terrorizing campers and cabin owners. (Glacier Park contains some property that was in private hands before the park was created.) Michele Koons and four friends settled in for the night in a campsite at Trout Lake that held a season’s worth of litter, including excess food abandoned by previous campers who did not want to carry it back over a nearby ridge to their vehicles. Our modern “pack it in, pack it out” policy was not yet in effect.
The sow made repeated forays into their campsite that night. Koons’ companions climbed high into the nearby pine trees for safety, but she didn’t make it out of her sleeping bag before the bear grabbed her arm and dragged her off.
More than 40 years later, the survivors’ lingering trauma is obvious as they tell their stories in the documentary.
The immediate reaction after the maulings was to kill any grizzly that happened to get close to a human. But the Endangered Species Act of 1973 saved the bear, and wiser management — focusing on changing human behavior and allowing bears to be their natural selves — brought them back. The documentary reports that the northwestern Montana grizzly population, which numbered about 200 bears within Glacier Park in 1967, now is near 800 bears ranging over a broad swath of forest and wilderness extending well beyond park boundaries.
I wish I could tell you that better management has put an end to bear attacks, but that is not true and never will be true. For one thing, any female bear protecting her cubs is very dangerous, and people will inevitably stumble across mothers with cubs.
Also, bears exist at the top of the food chain, the same as us. They have no natural predators, and they will eat anything. They are smart enough to learn to be wary of humans, but without that wariness, a hungry bear may see a person as a large meal. Predatory bear attacks are rare, but they do happen.
There have been fatal grizzly attacks at Glacier National Park in 1976, 1980 (two women killed in one attack, a man killed two months later in another), 1987 (two men killed in separate attacks, including one in which the man followed a mother with cubs to photograph the bears), 1992 and 1998. Attacks also regularly happen elsewhere. There have been two deaths this summer, both near Yellowstone National Park, with one fatality at a Montana campground and one in Wyoming.
There were 200 million people in this country in 1967; today there are more than 300 million. Wildlife populations likewise have increased in many areas. More people plus more critters equals more encounters.
In the case of the coyote, the species was virtually unknown in the East before 1950. Now it is widely distributed, and eastern coyotes have crossbred with wolves in Canada. These are large and potentially dangerous creatures. Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell was killed by a pair of coyotes in Nova Scotia last year. This summer’s incidents in New York demonstrate that eastern coyotes are a real hazard, even in densely populated areas.
Why are coyotes moving into the suburbs? Because food is abundant there. Eastern coyotes will hunt deer, which have overrun many areas. But they will take easier prey when possible, including house cats left outdoors. This habituates the coyotes to think of human communities as a food source. A pair of coyotes might enter a backyard looking for a cat, but upon finding a small child playing alone, they may opportunistically attack.
It is only a matter of time before a child is killed. In the meantime, we should adopt and strictly enforce rules against letting pets run loose, and we urgently need to thin suburban deer herds, despite the objections of misguided animal-rights defenders. This is not a question of protecting cats or deer; it is about protecting children. The coyotes likewise must be hunted or trapped out of densely populated areas. Naturally, places like Rye are not suitable for recreational hunting, so this will need to be done by professionals.
In bear country — which is a lot of country these days — people need to secure their garbage and eliminate backyard food sources like bird feeders and fruit trees. Bears eat everything we eat and a lot of things we don’t. Remove the food sources and the bears will stay in the woods.
In November 1974, shortly after I started college, I camped with a group of students at Kintla Lake in the northwestern corner of Glacier Park. It had been a long Indian summer, and the first light snowfall came that weekend. Our campsite was spotless. We cached all our food in a backpack that we hoisted into a tree far from our tents, and we left nothing edible in our van.
On Sunday we returned to the vehicle to find bear prints in the snow on its roof. We had been examined, found to be uninteresting, and left alone.
In Glacier National Park, at least, the lessons of the night of the grizzlies had been learned and successfully applied.
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