Leader has seen big changes in Glacier

Glacier National Park’s Sperry and Granite chalets have stood for more than a century, and for much of that time, Lanny Luding has been as much a part of them as the fantastic vistas they overlook.

Luding, 77, announced his official retirement earlier this month, capping a more than 50-year career working in and managing the park’s historic backcountry chalets.

Luding’s nephew, Kevin Warrington, is half of the team that succeeded Luding as the manager of the chalets in 2005. His uncle’s leadership through the last four decades was critical, Warrington said, as both the park and those who explore it every year continued to change.

“All the unique things about these facilities sort of create their own challenges that we have risen to and mastered over the years, largely with Lanny’s help,” Warrington said. “Any success that I have is entirely because I am standing on his shoulders.”

The historic chalets have been run by the family concessionaire business since 1954, when Luding’s parents happened across an advertisement in the Hungry Horse News: Glacier National Park was looking for someone to take over operations at Sperry Chalet.

Having been constructed of stone instead of wood, Sperry was one of the only two chalets still standing in the park. Aside from Granite Park Chalet, the others had succumbed to rot and fire over the years.

“Mom talked dad into it,” Luding remembered. “Mom thought it was a great way to keep us kids off the street in the summer.”

It would become the family’s main business for the next 60 years.

To say that running Glacier’s chalets is demanding work would be an understatement.

There is no electricity and all supplies and trash must be packed in and out along miles of trails by 10-mule pack strings twice per week. The seasons are short, the expectations from guests are high and nearly every aspect of their operation requires meticulous foresight.

“There is a great need to always be cleaning, attending to someone’s needs, cooking, planning ahead and always simplifying,” Warrington said. “You reuse every plastic bag — even the twisty-ties — you save them. Newspaper becomes a precious commodity that you just don’t throw away.”

Spending each summer working at the historic structures, Luding and his siblings did a little bit of everything.

He was responsible for everything from putting up railings to washing laundry and dishes, hauling garbage and caring for his younger cousins.

As he transitioned into his leadership role, Luding spent less time at the chalets, but for two decades would hike up to each of the chalets at least once each week.

Warrington, who got his start staffing the facilities with the rest of the family, remembers Luding’s uncanny ability to sense what was going on in the high country.

“When the staff would sneak off at night and get into trouble in some fashion, he always knew what we were up to,” he said with a laugh. “That was a unique psychic ability he demonstrated.”

Prior to Luding and his parents first taking over the chalets in 1954, the structures were on their way to becoming casualties of the automobile era.

In the decades leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II at the end of 1941, visitation, driven largely by rail, increased steadily.

From 1932 to 1941, annual attendance rose from a five-year average of nearly 63,000 to more than 174,000. In each of the next four years, less than 70,000 people visited the park.

But after the war ended, the sudden availability of mass-produced automobiles changed the way visitors experienced the park.

“All the GI’s came back, wanted their own car and they got one, because Ford and Chevy were building them as fast as they could,” Luding said.

Annual attendance increased 10-fold during the decade following the war’s end, and no longer did train passengers planning extended stays in Glacier and its backcountry facilities make up the bulk of park users.

In the beginning, business was slow.

“A lot of those naturalist groups were the ones that used to come, and they particularly liked Glacier, which was more of the wilderness park,” he said. “But the percentage of people that actually got out of their cars and spent time seeing anything off the road was pretty small for a while.”

Once he turned 18, Luding left to get a degree from Montana State University. He spent 15 months fighting in Vietnam before returning and working at the mines in Anaconda. He spent a year in east Texas as a photographer before returning to oversee the introduction of the chalets’ reservation system.

These days, it takes some fairly meticulous planning and obsessively hitting the “refresh” button on a computer screen to nail down a reservation for Sperry or Granite Park.

In 1970, the reservations came via the U.S. Postal Service, but it still marked the end of an era.

“It got to the point that we had to do something,” he said. “They realized, there’s 50 miles of road and 700 miles of trail — they must be missing something.”

Throughout his career, Luding watched Glacier grapple with its ever-rising popularity.

By the late 1960s, campgrounds had started springing up throughout the park, and visitation seemed to be increasing every year.

“They realized they could not keep building campgrounds at this rate,” he remembered. “If they did, it was just going to be one big campground on the side of the highway.”

With the environmental movement at the time, he said the allure of backcountry travel picked up again, and park officials worked to disperse visitors away from the road.

“In ’74 they built the boardwalk at Logan Pass. That was controversial as hell, but even at that point they were concerned with how to handle the increased in traffic on the roads.”

Sperry and Granite Park continued to grow in popularity, but the iconic structures weren’t immune to other changes visibly altering the landscape.

For Northwest Montana, the increasing frequency of massive wildfires came to a head in 2003, and as the 57,000-acre Robert Fire tore through Glacier that summer, the park ordered the evacuation of Sperry Chalet.

“The kids, in the evening, would hike a mile up to Lincoln Peak,” Luding said. “They could see it across the lake, and they said they could actually hear it up there. The Robert Fire really rammed home that these new fires are not the same as the old boys.”

Sperry Chalet remained unscathed, and a couple of years later Luding stepped down to an advisory role on the concession company’s board of directors.

Now officially retired, he said he’s looking forward to a quieter retirement in Columbia with his wife of 31 years, Patricia.

While no longer a direct influence on the day-to-day operations in the park, Luding will still periodically appear at the company’s former headquarters in Belton Chalet. It’s one of the venues for the Belton Blues Band, in which he’s the drummer.

Beyond that, he’s keeping his next steps open-ended.

“We’re not really sure what we’re going to do,” he said. “I’ll play a little music.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.