Retiring ranger recalls rescues

As a ranger on the Flathead Forest Reserve in 1906, before Glacier National Park was established, Frank Liebig came across an emergency on Grinnell Glacier — a woman had fallen into a crevasse.

Being a resourceful ranger, Liebig put a tree across the chasm, tied a rope to the tree and lowered himself down to the woman. Eventually, he got her out and everyone present believed she was deceased. But as her body was being transported out of the area, her head struck a rock and she awoke. It turned out she was extremely hypothermic and she eventually recovered.

Fast forward to 2004, and Glacier National Park Ranger Gary Moses found himself in the same position as Liebig, at the bottom of a crevasse on Grinnell Glacier, trying to rescue a man who fell in and was wedged in the narrow, icy crack.

“I had better technology” than Liebig, Moses said, but after a dramatic, four-hour effort, the man was extracted and was pronounced dead at the scene.

After working 28 years as a National Park Service ranger, mostly in Glacier Park, Moses has plenty of stories. He recently shared some of the best with about 60 people at the Glacier National Park Associates winter speaker series at the Kalispell Central School Museum.

Moses, who is retiring at the end of February, focused on search and rescue in the park dating from the turn of the last century to the last couple of decades when Moses had a hand in many of the missions.

He arrived in Glacier in 1989, and two years later was involved with the rescue of five people who plunged 750 feet down an avalanche chute in a van that went off Going-to-the-Sun Road.

The recovery of the victims and their vehicle involved using a hoist anchored to a visitor’s car on Sun Road to lift the victims and the van up the steep slope.

“The challenge on this one was that the (victims) who could speak only spoke Italian,” he said. Four of the people were ejected from the vehicle as it tumbled downhill. The driver was belted in, but was the most seriously injured.

At one point Moses thought the man was certain to die because of his dire vital signs. But he survived as a quadriplegic who was thankful to be alive.

“He taught me something I’ll never forget — about the will to live,” Moses recalled.

As a skilled technical climber, Moses was involved with the rescue of a man who attempted to parachute off Mount Siyeh in 1997. The man’s parachute got caught on a rock outcropping.

As a scuba diver, he has been involved with recovering drowning victims.

Moses has been involved with many search missions for hikers and skiers and airplanes. The list goes on for a park that has a 10-year average of 32 search-and-rescue missions every year. Last year and 2007 were record years, each with 54 missions.

But search and rescue has been just one of his duties.

“People ask what you do and the standard answer is law enforcement, emergency-medical, search and rescue, structural firefighting, wildland firefighting, wildlife management, visitor interpretation, outreach and public education,” he said. “The diversity is truly the challenge of the ranger’s job and what makes it so much fun. Every day can be different.”

Because of his all-around experiences and dedication, Moses was named the country’s top National Park Service ranger in 2008, when he received the Harry Yount Award.

“These award recipients are the best of the best and exhibit the highest qualities of rangering in their daily activities of protecting park resources and serving the visitor,”  the National Park Service director said at the time.

Moses was a humble recipient, saying that “I’m standing on the shoulders of many other rangers. Not only mentors but fellow rangers. Very little of what we do is done by a single ranger. It usually involves a team of people.”

Moses, 52, follows his wife Amy Vanderbilt, a longtime Glacier public affairs officer, into retirement. He said he plans to “explore other opportunities and take advantage of the opportunities of living in Northwest Montana.”

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