Longtime park ranger retires

Some reporters over the years have affectionately called him “Jack Pot,” because Jack Potter is a treasure trove of information for anything related to Glacier National Park.

Any type of animal, any plant, any place, any trail, any aspect of the park, Potter pretty much knows it all after a 41-year career in the park that came to an end with his recent retirement. But it really won’t come to an end, because Potter and his wife, Rachel, intend to carry on with volunteer work in the park for years to come.

“I just wanted to do something different,” said Potter, who was the park’s chief of science and resource management. “I just wanted to go out at a time when I was still enthusiastic about the job and still making a contribution.”

Glacier Superintendent Chas Cartwright says Potter’s influence on the park can’t be overstated.

“What I love most about Jack is that he made this incredible contribution, a legacy that will live for a long time,” said Cartwright, who like other superintendents considered Potter a go-to guy for learning about the park. When Cartwright arrived at Glacier about three years ago, Potter was one of his first trail guides, taking him on a hike to Goat Haunt and the Cathedral Peak area.

“I don’t know of anybody who knew more than him and had more of a sense of what fits with Glacier National Park,” Cartwright said. “It’s a whole lot of knowledge walking out the door, but it’s a whole lot of great judgment to make the right decisions to make sure that Glacier is a great place to visit in the future.”

Potter, 61, arrived in the park in 1970 as a college freshman with a busboy job at the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn.

“I didn’t want to be in the dining room anymore so I got on the trail crew,” said Potter, who recalls being attracted more to the place rather than a career in the National Park Service, an agency where people often transfer to different locations.

Not Potter. For 33 years, he was on or in charge of trail crews on both sides of the park, a running experience that built his hands-on knowledge of Glacier, in addition to his off-duty adventures in the park. He estimates he has covered 25,000 miles in Glacier, off-trail and on, climbing peaks, bushwhacking through drainages, whether it be on foot, skis, snowshoes or horseback.

On the job, he’s picked up some interesting skills over the years. Potter became the park’s chief explosives blaster to clear snow from trails, a practice that has waned over the years.

“We just discovered that blasting snow ... was really costing us a  lot of money and it was only gaining us a short amount of time” in opening a trail for public use, he said. “It’s been really scaled back.”

Potter also was recruited as a stock packer.

“One of those years we were short of packers on the east side so I kind of had to jump in it with both feet,” he said.

Since then, he’s been the packer-wrangler for a variety of projects and many of the annual superintendents hikes. Eventually, Potter was named the park’s assistant chief ranger in charge of resource management, and that propelled him into the arena of deciding how the park takes on matters such as wildfires, bears and invasive species.

During the first part of his career, the park was regarded by many as an “asbestos forest” because wildfires were relatively scarce and small in size, Potter said.

But then came the 1988 Red Bench fire, a powerful blaze that ripped into the park from the North Fork Flathead drainage. Potter recalls that bulldozers were used in the park to try to curb the fire, but dozer lines were largely ineffective and extensive rehabilitation was required to remove the scars from the park landscape.

The park’s approach to large fires has since changed, with more of an emphasis on allowing them to burn for resource management purposes, unless park facilities and other infrastructure are at risk.

Bear management also has evolved considerably since the 1970s. Visitor education, food storage regulations and rules for managing problem bears have all been modified over time.

“There’s always the risk [of bear-human conflicts], and we were trying to minimize the risks and stop bear habituation wherever we could,” Potter said.

Potter said the most rewarding part of his career was in seeing a ban on mining in British Columbia’s Flathead drainage after years of recurring proposals for coal and gold mines that would have had a lasting impact on Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park. But the provincial ban on mining didn’t come about until this year. All of the previous proposals were of grave concern in Montana and for Glacier park officials in particular.

Potter is convinced that one mine would have led to another, with lasting impacts on wildlife, fisheries and water quality in Montana’s Flathead Basin if the mining prohibition didn’t come about.

“That was a big deal,” he said. “The threat was real. There could have been three different coal mines just across the border.”

Potter said a big challenge for the park in future years will be the resulting effects of climate change, which have been obvious to Potter in his four-decade tenure. The park’s glaciers have been rapidly receding, and most are expected to disappear within the next 25 years.

Potter recalls clearing trail to a much larger Grinnell Glacier in the 1970s.

“Of all the [changes] that are the most graphic to me is the formation of that lake at the base of Grinnell,” he said. “I can hardly remember that being there.”

Climate change will result in vegetation changes and expected effects on wildlife such as wolverine. Warmer waters will impact effects on aquatic insects and fisheries. There also will be changes for noxious weeds, native insect infestations and plant and animal diseases.

“The big giant out there is what kind of trajectory climate change will take,” Potter said. “How rapid and how continuous it will be will make a lot changes. The park could be a different place” in a matter of a few decades.

Potter said he and Rachel and his daughter, Elena, plan to be around the park for years to come. This month, he will be volunteering at the Belly River Ranger Station, one of his favorite places in the park.

And he plans on plenty of returns to his favorite trails —Boulder Pass, the Dawson-Pitamakan loop and Fifty Mountain.

“And I like to do a lot of those east-side ridge walks,” he said.

Cartwright said he’s hoping he hasn’t seen the last of Potter on the trail.

“I’ve lost my best hiking buddy. To get out in this park, and see and hear things from his knowledge base, what a great way to get oriented to the park,” Cartwright said. “I plan on trying to lure him back for some hikes.”

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.