| 1 | Glacier Park, the place where it happened |
Glacier Park is one of the most gorgeous environmental havens in the USA. It’s not a true wilderness, seeing as there’s wooden lodges and garbage cans all over the park, but it’s home to 130 lakes, thousands of wild plant species, and hundreds of different animals. The park is located in Montana, on the US-Canadian border, and is well known for bears, both black bears and brown.
Deaths are rare, with the most recent being a horribly unlucky cyclist who turned round a bend in 2016 and crashed right into a mother grizzly and cubs. In fact, after its foundation in 1912, there wasn’t a single grizzly bear attack until one terrible day in August 1967, which changed America’s perception of bears forever.
The stormclouds began to gather one week earlier, when a hungry bear chased a group of Girl Scouts and tried to pinch their lunch. This bear had been a troublemaker since well before August 12th arrived, spending long, intimate hours with the garbage pile outside Kelly’s Camp, a private lodge close to Lake MacDonald. According to Glacier Park ranger David Shea: “we knew there was something not quite right with it“. The park management didn’t think to euthanise the grizzly, whereas according to Shea, it would be a goner nowadays. It was an oversight which was to have fatal consequences.
| 2 | The first attack |
19 year old Julie Helgesen was a resident of Albert Lea, Minnesota, a summer employee of East Glacier Park Lodge who worked in the laundry. 18 year old Roy Ducat also worked there as a busboy, and eventually the two became a couple. Their adventures took them 20 miles east of the fateful Trout Lake, which became important several hours later.
They started in Logan Pass, before ascending to a spot 1/4 mile away from Granite Park Chalet, a classical wooden chalet perched on a mountainside like a still from the Sound Of Music, with sweeping glacial valleys all around. They erected their tents at 7pm, ate their packed dinners and watched the sun set. The young lovebirds slept in the same sleeping bag, within touching distance of a lodge packed with summer guests.
Unfortunately, they accidentally chose the trail which bears had recently established for their garbage foraging missions. Employees at Granite Park Chalet had begged them not to, according to ranger Shea, but the young couple didn’t listen.
At 4pm, Ducat was awakened when Helgeson whispered to him that a bear was outside their tent. The grizzly flushed them out of their sleeping bags, and minutes later, it had pounced on Helgeson, before suddenly switching focus to Ducat. He was being mauled by an onslaught of bear paws, before his incredible calmness in playing dead paid off and the bear gave up. But now, it switched its focus to Helgeson.
| 3 | Julie Helgeson, part 2 |
Ducat fled the tent to search for ranger assistance, as Helgesen’s screams echoed around the forest. “Someone help us”, she cried as the bear dragged her off. When Ducat reached Granite Park Chalet with a badly mangled arm, one ranger was overly cautious, worried about endangering more lives. They didn’t initiate the search for Helgeson until 2 hours later, once Ducat was whisked off to hospital and a rifleman had arrived.
It took a while to find her, but after following a trail of blood downhill, Helgeson’s mangled body was discovered, 120 metres away from the tent and face down. The bear had dragged her into the woods. Incredibly, she was alive, but she had lost pints of blood and was in severe shock. The only words she could murmur were “it hurts”. After moving her to Granite Park Chalet at 3:36am, the rangers summoned a rescue helicopter to airlift Helgeson to the hospital 40 miles away in Kalispell. But at 4:12am, minutes before the helicopter arrived, Julie Helgeson died on a makeshift operating table. A doctor declared the original cause of death to be throat and lung punctures.
It was the first death due to grizzly assault in Glacier Park’s history, but the second was to happen unimaginably quickly.
| 4 | The second attack |
Michelle Koons was another 19 year old girl, a resident of San Diego, and another summer employee of Glacier National Park, this time in the gift shop. On August 12th, she was hiking a steep, 8 mile trail to reach Trout Lake with her fellow employees Paul Dunn, Ray Noseck, Ron Noseck, and Denise Huckle. Fellow hikers warned her about a gnarly, hungry grizzly stalking the nearby area, but Koons wasn’t phased, nor were her friends. After all, Glacier National Park had opened in 1910, and by 1967, there had been no serious incidents involving a brown bear. Michelle had also brought her pet dog Squirt, which was the first error, seeing as dogs were banned in Glacier Park even then.
At 8pm, a hungry, emaciated bear came sniffing into camp as predicted. The 5 friends fled into the woods, and waited patiently while the grizzly stole the fresh fish and hotdogs they were frying. The bear then returned to its log jam hideout, along with one of their backpacks. The 5 friends moved their campsite closer to Trout Lake and snacked on cookies instead. Then they fell asleep by the shore, with their sleeping bags surrounding a central fireplace, which they’d decided to light to keep the bear away.
| 5 | The bear strikes in darkness |
The night of August 12th to 13th was an unusually stormy one, with forks of lighting striking down to a shattering noise in all corners of the park. At 4:30am, Denise Huckle startled awake. Instead of peace and quiet, she found the same gnarly bear tugging at her sleeping bag.
She was close enough to see the bear’s hungry face in the darkness, and feel its hot, humid breath. She decided to play dead, and miraculously, the bear was fooled and left her. But when Michelle Koons woke up, she couldn’t keep so calm. She started screaming the moment she laid eyes on the bear.
The spooked grizzly grew angrier and angrier, and started taking mad swipes, causing Dunn, Huckle and the Noseck brothers to scramble out of the tent and climb up some nearby trees as fast as possible. But the zipper on Koons’ sleeping bag was stuck. Her friends shouted at her to get moving, but instead, Koons screamed that the bear was ripping her arm off.
The last they heard of Koons were moans of “Oh my God, I’m dead”. Dunn reported later that he’d witnessed the bear dragging Koons away into the woods. Terrified, they remained in their tree sanctuaries until dawn, before daring to climb down.
| 6 | Rangers spring to action |
Bursting into Lake MacDonald cabin at 8am, they found the helping hand of ranger Leonard Landa. The words spilled out in a blur that Landa could barely understand, but he finally got the gist, and interjected that the attack had taken place by Granite Chalet, not Trout Lake. No, this was a second attack, they said. Landa couldn’t believe it. Two attacks in one night – what were the odds?
After phoning headquarters, Landa asked two of the hikers to come with them for guidance. They reached the campsite by 10am, and started yelling for Koons, but ranger Landa had already found a piece of flesh. This led to a trail of blood, and finally the dead body of Michelle Koons, 91 metres away from the campsite.
Not far away, the same thing happened when a sleepy ranger Gildart received a radio call summoning him to Trout Lake. The bear attack happened at Granite Lake, he responded, before hearing the unbelievable news of the second mauling. After reaching Landa, he and Gildart joined forces and loaded Koons into a body bag which a helicopter had dropped off.
By the next morning, August 13th, the park authorities had ordered the shooting of any grizzly bears in the immediate vicinity of Granite Lake Chalet.
| 7 | Hunt for the killer bear |
Gildart and Landa rose to action immediately. Firstly, they rounded up the remaining hikers and gave them an armed escort out of the park. On August 13th, they killed two aggressive bears which they knew were familiarised with human contact after garbage rustling, but found no evidence that they were the culprits.
Next, they tried dropping cans of fish in Arrow Lake, but after waiting several hours, the bear refused to appear. They retired to Arrow Lake shelter for the night, but when Gildart awakened at 5:30am, he stepped outside for a moment and saw a female grizzly in the faint light of dawn. It was 40 feet away, standing next to a ranger’s office. It was peering out over a lake, but Gildart felt a sharp sense that they were being hunted.
Suddenly, the bear charged. Gildart and Landa let off a volley of bullets, stopping the bear mid-charge, killing it instantly. A forensic expert arrived, who sliced open the bear’s stomach, causing a ball of blond hair to spill out onto the forest floor. It was all the evidence they needed.
Something else that Gildart and Landa noticed was that the slain bear had glass embedded in its gums. Because it couldn’t chew properly, the female bear was agonisingly thin, just 200 pounds. This had obviously forced it into an unusually aggressive state, and soon, it became apparent that poor garbage management was the real villain of the piece.
| 8 | Garbage gets the blame |
For a while, the dazzling lightning storm of August 12th was blamed, having spooked the bears and made them hyperaggressive. Raging wildfires that summer were also blamed, pushing the bears into closer contact with people, particularly given that 20 fires had started on August 11th alone. But the glass in the killer bear’s gums was the jolt that people needed.
Until 1967, Glacier Park had garbage control rules that would be astonishingly lax today. Open dumps were common, and visitors openly tossed food to the bears. Why would they be concerned, when bears hadn’t attacked anyone in Glacier Park’s 50 year history? Supposedly, Glacier Park’s bear management plan was only 3 pages long in 1969, compared to a whopping 50 pages in 2019. The park had known for years that feeding grizzlies garbage was a highway to disaster, but action was kicked down the road.
On August 9th 1967, 4 rangers including Shea and Gildart had visited the Granite Park Chalet, and quickly noticed 5 bears feeding on garbage strewn everywhere. Ranger Shea later said: “it was basically an incident waiting to happen. Four days later, it did“.
On the evening before Helgesen’s death, for example, the residents of the Granite Park Chalet had enticed the local grizzly bears to come say hello with old ham joints, pouring out of the chalet after interrupting a group singalong of “row, row, row your boat”. Shea believed that the Chalet was trying to fulfil an advertisement of guaranteed grizzly sightings, and he quickly lodged a written complaint, but nothing happened.
| 9 | Rangers clean up the park for good |
Koons and Helgeson weren’t coming back, but their deaths weren’t in vain. Almost immediately after the attack, the hero rangers Shea and Gildart were dispatched to begin a new mission: picking up garbage. A hard rule was established that anyone bringing food into Glacier National Park had to bring their garbage out with them. Several days later, Gildart left the park by helicopter with 17 burlap sacks full of garbage.
Most importantly, open waste dumps were completely banned, to eliminate the attraction to sniffing, starving bears. Rangers even hunted down individual hikers and ordered them to leave if they were making a mess. Information signposts were nailed in, and bear-proof trash cans became common. The old upturn and gorge method wouldn’t work on these cans. Essentially, Glacier Park adopted a “leave no trace” philosophy.
Ultimately, most agree that the events of August 1967 helped grizzlies in the long run. At first, the cleanliness caused the bears of Glacier Park to starve, as they had been accustomed to free, effortless food for years. Two cubs were shot one year later because they couldn’t keep away from human civilisation – these were the children of one of the innocent bears shot dead on August 13th. Over time though, with iron garbage discipline from rangers, the Glacier Park bears reverted to their natural hunting and scavenging.
| 10 | The aftermath |
For months afterwards, storied appeared in national newspapers portraying grizzly bears as savage, lumbering beasts who cared only about human flesh and nothing else. Some overzealous park officials even called for the grizzly bear’s extinction. Ranger Gildart admits to having been angry at bears for years afterwards, before realising that they were only pushed to savagery by hard circumstances.
Jack Olsen published the definitive account in a three part Sports Illustrated special, before upgrading to a full length book called Night Of The Grizzlies in 1969, the original source of the name. He argued that brown bears were doomed to be pushed back to Canada, and then Alaska, where “all the goodwill and understanding in the world…will not alter his eventual fate“.
A weirder consequence was a new urban legend – that bears are attracted to the scent of menstruating women. One of the victims was indeed menstruating, while the other was carrying tampons. For years, female rangers were even banned from Yellowstone Park while menstruating, and government pamphlets warned hikers of the risk in eye-catching terms. As of 2021 though, there’s no evidence to support the theory, and it’s generally laughed at.
The final word is that Glacier Park boasts a healthy 300 grizzly bears as of 2022. Meanwhile, only 10 grizzly-related deaths have happened there since 1910, out of hundreds of thousands of overall visitors.
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