Just after midnight on August 13, 1967, a grizzly walked into a campsite a few hundred yards below Granite Park Chalet, high on the Garden Wall in Glacier National Park, and attacked two people asleep there. Julie Helgeson, nineteen, of Albert Lea, Minnesota, and Roy Ducat, of Perrysburg, Ohio, both worked that summer at the park's lodges. They had hiked in on the Highline Trail the afternoon before, found the chalet full, and laid out their sleeping bags in the campground below it. The bear mauled Ducat, then turned to Helgeson and dragged her away. Searchers found her down the slope and carried her to the chalet, where she was pronounced dead at 4:13 that morning. Ducat survived.
Fewer than ten miles to the southwest, another grizzly came into a camp of five young park employees at Trout Lake before dawn and killed Michele Koons, also nineteen, who worked in the gift shop at Lake McDonald Lodge. In the fifty-seven years since the park was created, no grizzly in Glacier had killed anyone. In one night, two did.
Garbage and an audience
Neither bear came out of nowhere. Granite Park Chalet had so many guests that summer that its incinerator could not keep up, and the overflow went into a gully behind the building. Grizzlies came to it in the evenings, and watching them had become part of a night at the chalet; one ranger later said the people running it fed the bears to give the guests a show. At Trout Lake a grizzly had been harassing campers for some time, there and at a camp nearby, running people off and taking their food, and reports of it had reached the park without bringing any action. When the ranger Bert Gildart went to the lake after the attack, he carried out seventeen bags of garbage from the site.
Rangers killed the Trout Lake bear within days, and it was tied to Koons's death. At Granite Park, suspicion fell on a young female with two yearling cubs, though the case there was never as certain.
What changed
The two deaths, and the news that the bears had been drawn to people by their food, became a national story. The journalist Jack Olsen turned his reporting into a book in 1969, and its title, Night of the Grizzlies, gave the night its name. The Park Service rewrote the way it handled bears, beginning in Glacier. Garbage feeding and open dumps ended, the backcountry got food-storage rules, and the working principle became simple: a bear must never learn to connect people with food. Park staff still describe the night as the turning point for bear management, in Glacier and across the national parks.
Grizzlies have killed people in Glacier since 1967, and most of those bears too had learned to look for human food. The rules that came out of that August are the ones every visitor meets now: the food-hanging cables and prep areas at backcountry camps, the warnings against leaving coolers in a car, the advice to carry bear spray and know how to use it. Granite Park Chalet still stands on its knob below the Garden Wall, open in summer and reached only on foot, and it is still where many hikers on the Highline Trail stop for the night.