NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLIES

It was midnight when Bert Gildart heard the voice come over his radio.

The fires that had been raging throughout the summer of ’67 had quelled for the night and the road patrol ranger was towing equipment over Glacier National Park’s Logan Pass.

The caller — a woman — needed a message relayed to park headquarters, and quickly.

There had been a mauling at Granite Park Chalet.

A grizzly bear had attacked 19-year-old Julie Helgeson, of Albert Lea, Minnesota, who’d been camping 500 yards from the popular hiking destination.

She was last seen screaming as she was dragged down the mountainside.

Four hours after he’d passed on the news, Gildart was back at his quarters and heard a knock at the door.

He opened it to find dispatch ranger Norm Hagen.

“He said, ‘Bert, you’ve got to get up and go to Trout Lake — there’s been a mauling up there. I said ‘Norm, you’re crazy, the mauling was at Granite Park Chalet. He said, ‘No, there’s been another mauling.’”

Gildart and a small troupe cut through the black night toward Trout Lake to search for yet another young woman — this time it was 19-year-old Michele Koons of San Diego, California.

Once they reached the campfire where Michele was last seen alive, they spread out and began searching along the trail.

Park ranger Leonard Landa was in the middle of the pack and stopped just a few minutes into the search, turning to Gildart.

“Bert, here she is.”

Koons had been severely mauled by the bear and had extensive wounds to her stomach area.

“Oh my gosh, the mauling was so extreme you just can’t believe it,” Gildart said. “It really made an impact on me.”

The unthinkable had happened.

Two grizzly bears killed two young women on the same night in Glacier National Park.

The events of Aug. 13, 1967, were the first fatal grizzly attacks since the park opened its gates in 1910 and later became known as the “night of the grizzlies.” The deaths of Michele and Julie stunned the nation and spurred a drastic change in bear management nationwide.

But the change came at a cost.

Two young lives, lost. Two families, irrevocably changed.

But they don’t blame the park, or even the bears.

They don’t think about the final moments, and how scary and painful it must have been.

Instead they remember Julie and Michele as they once were: young, vibrant and full of life.

Julie Helgeson had just finished her freshman year at the University of Minnesota when she got a job working at the laundry facility in Glacier Park’s East Glacier Lodge.

Her cousin, Laurie George described Julie as a “really fun, really kind, beautiful girl.”

“Of my cousins, she was my favorite,” George recalled.

She remembered receiving a card from Julie, telling of her plans to work in Glacier for the summer. Julie wrote about how excited she was for the opportunity, although she knew she’d miss her family and friends.

What she didn’t know is that she’d never see them again.

Julie departed East Glacier Lodge the morning of Aug. 12, 1967, accompanied by her friend, Roy Ducat, of Perrysburg, Ohio. They hitched a ride in a pickup on the park’s main thoroughfare, Going-to-the-Sun Road, and hopped out near Logan Pass. The pair set out on the Highline Trail en route to Granite Park Chalet — a stonewalled building located 7.8 miles from the trailhead. Hours later, they arrived at the chalet, only to find it full. They were told a campsite was being developed not far from the chalet, and opted to make camp there.

They weren’t the only ones who frequented the terrain surrounding the guest house.

“People were feeding bears at Granite Park Chalet — the mangers at Granite Park Chalet were feeding bears up there to attract tourists,” Gildart explained.

According to a documentary titled “Glacier Park’s Night of the Grizzlies” produced by Montana PBS, back in the ‘60s, it was not uncommon for campers to leave food and other garbage in the backcountry and near campsites. Although the practice was against park regulations, it wasn’t strictly enforced either. Tourists would flock to the chalet to watch bears feed on garbage in the evening. In some locations, bleachers were even erected to cater to the eager viewers.

At Granite Park Chalet, rangers had an incinerator to dispose of trash, but the sole barrel was too small for their needs and garbage dumping continued, according to the film.

“In their defense, prior to 1967 there had never been a fatal mauling,” Gildart explained. “Most bears that you encountered in those days, if you saw one, would run and that had always been my experience.”

But the bear that would invade Julie and Roy’s camp was different.

The pair settled in for the night until Roy was awoken by Julie who whispered, “play dead.”

Roy, groggy from sleep, started to move, and the bear came at him and tossed the young man out of his sleeping bag. The bear jumped on his back and bit him on the shoulder and then the legs and back.

“After he thought I was dead, he left me and I heard him start to bite Julie,” Roy said in the documentary. “I can’t remember how long. It seemed like forever, but pretty soon she started screaming and yelling and then he picked her up and then I heard her screams going down the mountainside.”

When rescuers found Julie, she was severely injured and clinging to life.

“She was obviously a strong person that she could stay alive that long,” George said.

They carried her up the hill to the chalet where they were met by three doctors and a nurse, who happened to be guests that evening.

But Julie had lost too much blood.

Father Tom Connolly baptized her and read Julie her last rites. As he was reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Connolly felt her hand go limp.

At 4:13 a.m., Aug. 13, 1967, Julie was pronounced dead.

“I remember the day our dad got the call,” George said. “All I remember was being awakened early in the morning by my dad yelling. I ran into his room and my mom was like, ‘We have to go, Julie’s been killed.’”

George picked up a newspaper at the airport and saw the news of her cousin’s abrupt passing on the front page.

“This hit close to home. This happened to someone with my name, who I knew,” she said. “I remember going up there a few years after she died with her family … I remember going in her room. They left it like it was. There was nothing that had changed. I remember feeling like, where’s Julie? She should still be here.”

Julie’s death darkened any associations the family had with bears, which came to light when George attended a movie with Julie’s parents.

“I know it was horrible for her parents. It was awful — nobody should lose a child, much less in a tragedy like that,” George said. “There was a bear in the cartoon and (Julie’s mom) couldn’t go in there. She couldn’t go in the theater.”

George said she still has fond memories of time spent with her late cousin, but also harbors one unanswered question.

“I often wonder, what she would have been, what she would have become. Had she lived, she would have been 69,” she said. “What she would be doing?”

Michele Koons, at just 5-feet-1-inch tall, wasn’t a particularly large person, but for what she lacked in height she made up for in personality. The California Western University freshman was popular in school, active in church — and even voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by her high school peers.

“In a crowd of people, she would have been in the middle of what was going on, telling a story with great humor and vivacity,” said her sister, Teri Culpepper.

In the summer of 1967, Michele worked at the Lake McDonald Lodge gift shop in Glacier National Park. During her brief time there, she made a lasting impact on 11-year-old Mark Shostrom, of Los Angeles. He reached out to Michele’s family earlier this year to share his story. He wrote that his favorite pastime was to visit the gift store to visit Michele.

“She was sweet and friendly, and each time I came by, she always made me feel like I was the most important person she had run into that day,” he wrote.

Suffice it to say, Shostrom spent a lot of money on candy that summer.

“I still remember Michele’s warmth and kindness, after half a century,” he said in closing.

Michele’s brother, Weston Koons, said his family visited Michele at the park three weeks before her death. “Her memorial service here in San Diego was standing-room only,” Koons wrote. “So you see … even though my sister only lived to 19 years of age, she made her mark on this world and our family is fortunate that we are still reminded of that.”

Michele’s last day began on the trail.

She and four friends, Paul Dunn, Ray and Ron Noseck, and Denise Huckle with her dog, Squirt, headed into the backcountry toward Trout Lake — a remote, yet scenic mountain lake. To get there, the group took the shorter of the two possible routes, opting to scale 2,500 vertical feet over Howe Ridge, to shave 3.4 miles off their trek.

Along their hike, Michele and her friends encountered two hikers who had been treed by a grizzly, who warned them of bear activity in the area, according to the PBS documentary. They made camp and all but Michele and Squirt went fishing. Once the group returned to camp, they started a fire to cook the fish when Michele said, “Here comes a bear.”

The bear scavenged for food around the campsite, before returning to the log jam that bordered a portion of the lake.

The campers relocated closer to shore and started a fire, hoping to ward off future bear encounters.

Around 2 a.m., they could heard the bear moving around their first campsite, and two hours later, it made its way to their new spot.

Paul Dunn said he could hear the bear breathing and called it “probably one of the most frightening moments of my life.”

When Dunn heard the bear begin to walk on his sleeping bag, he threw his covers off, leapt over the fire and shimmied up a tree. The bear backed off, but quickly returned, prompting Ron Noseck and Huckle, holding Squirt, to take off running down the shoreline. From his perch in the tree, Dunn warned Ray Noseck and Michele to get out of the area.

He didn’t realize Michele hadn’t taken off until he heard her being attacked, according to the film.

“She screamed, ‘He’s got my arm,’” Dunn said. “Then the other thing she screamed was ‘Oh my God, I’m dead,’ which was bone-chilling.”

The foursome climbed trees and waited until first light when they felt safe enough to go seek help.

Michele’s sister said one possibility for Michele staying could have been a sleeping bag malfunction.

“If your zipper sticks and you can’t get out and the others get out and you’re left …” Culpepper said. “You just don’t think about the final minutes.”

This year, for the first time since Michele’s death, Culpepper returned to Glacier National Park.

She and her husband had no intention of hiking — let alone, making the trek out to Trout Lake.

They simply wanted to take in the beautiful place that Michele loved so much.

“You can’t let something like this stop you from enjoying the outdoors, but you do want to be safe because nobody thinks they’re going to be a statistic, but somebody’s got to be the statistic,” she said.

After Michele was killed, her parents hid newspapers from Culpepper and her siblings. They didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio for weeks. It wasn’t until 10 years ago that she went back and read a few of the stories about the night of the grizzlies.

More than a decade after Michele died, Culpepper and her husband relocated to New Zealand, where they still live today. The lack of bears on the island did not go unnoticed by Culpepper.

“One of the reasons that I was keen to follow my husband’s dream to go to New Zealand to live is that there’s no dangerous wildlife there — there’s not even snakes; there’s birds, there’s kiwis,” she said.

Culpepper doesn’t blame the park for what happened to Michele, she’s more disappointed that it took so much loss to inspire change.

“Sadly, it’s often born from something tragic happening — a lot of stoplights don’t go in on busy streets until somebody gets killed,” she said.

After Michele and Julie were killed, the park service ordered rangers to clean up garbage dumping areas and shoot any bears that returned to those sites, Gildart said.

“(Leonard) Landa and I were told a couple days later to go back in and to shoot any bear that we saw. Any bear at all with the assumption that any bear that we saw would probably be an aggressive bear,” Gildart said.

And by aggressive he meant accustomed to humans as a food source — and most importantly, without fear.

A few days after the attacks, Landa and Gildart camped out near Arrow Lake, not far from Trout Lake, amid their hunt for aggressive grizzlies. The following morning, at around 4:30 a.m., Gildart spotted a bear and called out to Landa to bring their two rifles.

“All of a sudden the bear comes, I wouldn’t say charging, but comes hastily moving toward us with determination in his eyes. It looked like it had a goal in mind,” he said. “As it diminished the distance, we both shot.”

The bear, an emaciated grizzly sow, was the same bear that had been harassing campers at Kelly’s Camp, a small group of cabins on Lake McDonald, for much of the summer; the same bear that harassed a troupe of Girl Scouts and even riders on horseback.

A forensic examination provided conclusive evidence — they’d bagged the bear that killed Michele. Other grizzlies were shot in the coming days, although none were officially determined to be the bear that took Julie’s life.

After the attacks, the park received more than 120 letters with possible theories as to why they occurred. Citizens cited perfumes, makeup, a lightning storm and food as potential causes. Gildart is convinced the latter is the true culprit.

“Nobody thought that you’d have two bears mauling two different girls,” Gildart said. “I don’t agree with that. If you take these circumstances — garbage all over the backcountry, garbage all over Granite Park Chalet — I think it was inevitable.”

Whether the attacks were in fact inevitable or merely coincidence, the change in bear management and food storage was substantial. Dumpsites were eliminated, campers hung caches of food separate from their campsites and the days of feeding grizzlies for entertainment were over.

These revelations weren’t limited to Glacier — parks nationwide learned from the night of the grizzlies and drew a sharp line between humans and bears.

It’s that line that brings comfort to the families of Julie and Michele.

“I came to say a final goodbye, knowing that out of the tragic circumstances of her (and Julie’s) death have come changes for good that will benefit humans and wildlife for years to come,” Culpepper wrote after her visit to the park. “That her life and death were not in vain is good enough for me.”

Reporter Mackenzie Reiss may be reached at 758-4433 or mreiss@dailyinterlake.com.