Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Grizzly Bear Attack - Night of the Grizzly: Part 1 - The Granite Park Chalet

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Part 1 of Night of the Grizzly, the tragic story of two grizzly attacks occurring on the same night in Glacier National Park. Wes prepared like a madman to get this episode to be as accurate and entertaining as possible, so we think you all are going to really enjoy it.  ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Wes. I'm going to be introducing this week's episode. This has been a long time coming. We're finally doing the night of the Grizzlies story. The story is about two women who lost their lives in 1967 in Glacier National Park. It's crazy because it involves two different bears, two different campsites, and just a really wild coincidence. And it's also the first human deaths from grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. So it's a pretty wild circumstance. It's a crazy story. It's one that I spent most. months preparing for. I'm excited to finally exercise it or exercise it. Get it out in the world. Get it off my chest. It's been a labor of love, but it's time to get it out there. I did want to do a couple disclaimers. The episode is very story heavy. It's one of three. We're doing a three-part series. This one has a lot of names, a lot of story. Just be patient. You're going to hear a lot of my voice. I'm just apologizing for that up front. Second, the part where I talked to Mike and Jeff about what they actually should do, the, you know, what would Mike and Jeff do? I want to make it clear that I'm talking about a grizzly bear attack in a campsite,

not just a general grizzly bear attack. Those things are very different. So the advice I give in the episode is very specific for a grizzly bear attack in a campsite. So just remember that because I wanted to make sure it was clear that that's what that advice is for. I think that's it. I'm really excited for you guys to listen in the episode. Again, it's one I put a lot of time into. Please share it if you like it.

And with no further ado, this is part one of Night of the Grizzlies. Everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We took a one week break and we're back addicted to podcasting. That's what we are. We just, we love. We can't stop. We love talking about people getting ripped apart by animals. Inject it right into my nostrils.

That's how drugs work, right? Yeah. It's me here with Jeff and Mike. We're like Bradley Cooper on the limitless drug. We just need it. We just keep needing it. We've got a taste for it. Or like, you know, millions of people addicted to other drugs in real life.

Yeah. No, that's just one example. Yeah. What are you addicted to, Wes? What am I addicted to? Podcasting. I already said it. What else?

Probably sugar. Sugar. I'm addicted to you. I'm addicted to sugar. That's the one thing that when I like stop eating it, I get real bad cravings for. Mike, what are you addicted to besides anime? That's my big vice. But second to that is I am a recovering coffee addict.

Ooh. I had no idea. Yeah. It's been about 16 years since I've had a cup. Wow. What? So you're not really recovering anymore. You're recovering.

Once an addict, always an addict, you know. Yeah. I'd say you recover. though. Sixteen years is pretty good. I went to lunch with Mike and he was saying his New Year's resolution. What is it again? Okay.

So the story is I got into an argument online with somebody and they ended the argument by saying, stop kidding yourself. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, he's done kidding himself. I'm done. Yeah. It was about Home Alone 1 versus Home Alone 2. And I was arguing that Home Alone 2 is better.

And he was just like, that's the stupid. stupidest thing I've ever heard, stop kidding yourself. And I was like, you know what? I will. I'll take a step back, objectively look, and Home Loan 2 is the better movie. It's the conclusion. You're wrong. Objectively.

That's a great resolution. He said he wants to be more of an adult, but then he has a filter with a bare ears and nose on himself right now. Baby steps. So do I, but I didn't say that. Jeff, do you have any resolutions? I'm doing 100 push-ups a day. That's good.

Cool. Yeah. My main one is to go to the gym more often, which I stopped during the pandemic, which we're still in. You can't just, that's not like a real one. I know, I know. And then my other one. You have to have like a set thing, like five days a week. Don't impose your resolution rules on my resolutions.

My other one is that I want to start getting into meditating more. And I've got some steps outlined to ease myself into that process. So those are my two main resolutions. They're pretty vague. I don't love resolutions. I usually don't do a lot, and I usually don't stick to them. So we'll see what happens. Anyway, so this is tooth and claw.

It's 2022. This is our first episode of the year. And we wanted to start with a doozy. Yeah, I did a lot of research for this. He didn't. He did zero research. I was up all night. I think you're thinking of me.

I did. The most research I've ever done for the, podcast on this episode. Really, my research for this episode started in like September, and I've been researching it ever since, and I can't stop thinking about it. And we're going to talk about it in a second. But first, I wanted to reintroduce ourselves. I'm Wes Larson. I'm a wildlife biologist. I've worked with four different bear species. I've worked with a lot of other animals. I'm obsessed with wildlife, and this podcast was born out of that obsession, and specifically an obsession with human wildlife conflict and the lessons we can learn from it and how we can

teach people to avoid having negative interactions with wildlife and only having positive interactions. So that's kind of where this podcast comes from. That's the heart of the podcast. And so far so good, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I'll introduce the other two. I'm Jeff.

I was Wes's field tech. I worked with Black Bears a bit and now I do a podcast. Yeah. Mike? So I am an aspiring animal lover, and I feel like I've made some pretty good tracks down that path. I'm kind of like the Padawan to Wes's Jedi Master. Like, say Wes is Anakin and I'm a youngling. Just say that.

That's kind of how it's going. Yeah, like I pulled out my metachlorians reader. That doesn't end well for you. And I was like, man, there's some good metaclorians on this guy. I'm going to bring him into the full. How do you feel about Metaclorians, Mike? Yeah, I don't know. How do you see him like when you sneeze?

Are they like in your snod or something? Where are they? I think that was the single dumbest thing that ever happened to. And this really saying something, Middoclorians is the dumbest thing that ever happened to Star Wars. It is. All right. Well, as I mentioned, this is a story I've been thinking about.

It's a story I've known about for a long time, but it's one that I really wanted to do on the podcast. It's one that I've kind of been saving, and I'm almost sad to do it because it's always been in my back pocket, and it's always been one that I was like, man, when we do Night of the Grizzlies, it's going to be crazy.

This is where we peek? Maybe. It's a crazy story. And as Jeff mentioned, like, I've just been researching and researching. I stayed up until midnight last night, doing more research. I woke up and immediately did more.

I read the book multiple times. I watched the documentary a few times. I think I'm ready. Are you guys ready? Yeah, I'm ready. I'm buckled up. Stoked now. Okay.

After that introduction, how could I not be? Yeah. Also, I believe this episode is going to be our first three-parter. So we've done a two-parter when we did the Lions of Savo, which was the other episode. I was really looking forward to. And don't get me wrong, there's a bunch more other stories that I'm looking forward to, but this is like one of the ones. This will be your masterpiece.

It'll be your own Lord of the Rings trilogy. We'll see. Anyway, this is going to be a three-parter. I'm going to break it up kind of in a unique way. And hopefully you guys can stick with us through all three parts. There's a lot of details here. I have a more detailed record for this story than I have for any of the other stories I've researched. So we're going to get into the real, like, nitty-gritty of this attack.

And we're going to really pull it apart. And I think that's important because this attack really changed the way that we looked at. Grizzlies. So it's the night of the Grizzlies. It's a double fatality that happened in 1967 in Glacier National Park. And up until this point, Glacier hadn't had a single fatality. And then in one night, they had two. So it was like a really crazy thing that happened. And it really affected the way we view grizzly bears. Like, this is probably an inappropriate comparison, but it was kind of like the 9-11 for how we view grizzlies and interact. with them.

I get what you're saying, though, yeah. We had this notion of safety and, like, everything was fine. And then this really awful thing happened that completely shattered that notion of safety. And it changed the way we interact with Grizzlies forever, especially in the national parks. So now Grizzly bears are terrorists. Yeah, they're on the red list. Yeah, they're on the watch list. They can't fly.

You can't. If you're a grizzly, you're not getting on a plane. I'm surprised that there wasn't a fatality. since 1960. It's crazy. That's crazy. And we're going to talk a bit about that and kind of the feeling that instilled in people. So I had heard of Night of the Grizzlies.

Like when I'd go into the park, I knew where both the attacks happened. I knew kind of the basic story of how it was a double fatality and two women died. But I really didn't know the nitty gritty. And I really dived in for this one. So we're going to get into it. Are you guys ready for part one of our Night of the Grizzlies trilogy? I'm ready. No.

Jeff, you're not ready. I'm not ready. Do you need a hug first? Or a blanket or something? I'm ready. All right. So first of all, I need to pay due to the, or I need to pay homage to my sources for this story. The main one is the book Night of the Grizzlies.

So this guy's kind of the guy that termed it Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olson. And he also wrote a three-week piece in Sports Illustrated. He was kind of the guy that got the story out. And it's like sold in a lot of National Park gift story. It's definitely sold in the Glacier one. It's called Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olson. I've pulled most of this information directly from this book. So I just want to let you guys know that.

This book is long. I mean, there's some really cool details in it about this attack. There's also a PBS documentary called Night of the Grizzlies based off of the book. Pretty much the same information. But if you want to consume it all in two hours instead of a few hours reading the book and just watch it. Do they have like the, what's the? it called where they like reenact. Yeah, drama citation.

It's like a black shadow getting like attacked by a bear's shadow or something. No, it's a pretty classy documentary and they have a lot of old photos from the 60s, which I really appreciate it because it helped me put faces to the names and everything. And then they interview a lot of the people that were part of this whole thing. So that was cool too to hear them talk about it in their own words. So check those out. Quickly, I want to start with a short history of Glacier National. Park. Glacier is my favorite national park. It's Jeff's favorite national park. Mike, is it yours?

I guess. I can't, I never know what the difference is between like a state and a national. So I just default to glacier. Okay. I mean, it is the most beautiful place. You've been there with us a few times. Like, we absolutely love it. I've been there countless times. I mean, does that matter though, Mike? Is there a state park that you like? Oh, yeah. The Oki-Finoki. Are you kidding me? You ever been there? Perfect. You can say that. Anyway, Glacier. is located completely within Montana. It was established in 1910. It encompasses over one million acres of pristine northern Rockies habitat. It's often called the crown of the continent, which kind of just means it's like the best part of the continent, which I agree with. It has over 130

named lakes, over a thousand species of plants, hundreds of species of animals, and that includes everything from like Columbia ground squirrels to grizzly bears. And a lot of people do go to glacier to see wildlife. It's not like Yellowstone where it's like you go on safari almost, but there is a lot of wildlife in glacier. It's easy to find black bears, grizzly bears, mountain goats, big horn sheep, meal deer, moose. I've seen wolverine in glacier. I mean, there's like, there's a lot of stuff in glacier. We've seen wolves there. It's all kinds of bugs. Mom's going to be so mad when she hears you talking about glacier like this. My mom is like, Whenever we, like, do an Instagram post of Glacier, she's like, don't tag Glacier.

Don't tell anyone. Everyone's going to go there. Like, no one knows where Glacier is. Anyway, it's a wonderful place. It's considered one of the few historically intact ecosystems in the United States. What does that mean? It means, like, based on, like, historical data, we still have all the animals that used to exist in Glacier. Like, when colonizers showed up pretty much, all the stuff that was there is.

still there. It's still intact from that point on. Good job, Glacier. Yeah. So speaking of colonized, before becoming a national park, Glacier was inhabited by indigenous peoples, primarily the Blackfoot tribe. And then under extreme pressure from the United States federal government, this was after like some big treaties. The Blackfeet ceded some of the mountainous parts of their treaty lands back to the government in the late 1800s. I shouldn't say back to the government. The government essentially stole this land from the Blackfeet Indians, tricked them in. giving the mountainous part back to them, and then they created a national park with it. So at least they created a park, and they didn't turn it into, like, you know, oil land or something.

But, I mean, this was indigenous land before white people stole it. So that area that they took back soon became Glacier National Park. When the park started, it saw roughly 4,000 visitors in its first year, and most of those visitors stayed in the front country because there really wasn't a trail system or any way for them to get around. Because of that, grizzly bears, which at the time were really persecuted, they were being killed throughout their range, they're being pushed away from areas where they had lived historically. White settlers just viewed them as a threat, viewed them as an undesirable animal. So they were being killed, and they're being persecuted really heavily. But they finally had a couple pockets where they could retreat and live without having to deal with people, including Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park.

and because the back country of Glacier National Park was so inaccessible when the park started, that was like a place where they could be and they just like didn't have to worry about people at all. So Grizzlies kind of created this stronghold in Glacier National Park in the early 1900s. Now between World War I and World War II, long horseback camping trips into the back country of Glacier became popular. And each year like thousands if not tens of thousands of adventure seeking people would set out on horseback into the backcountry to park. But still at this point, grizzly sightings were almost non-existent. And that's because a horse train creates a lot of noise, creates a lot of smell.

Bears can hear it coming from miles away, and they just would run away. They want nothing to do with a bunch of horses and people coming into the back country. I can relate. Yeah. Well, at this point, too, like, America was pretty into killing Grizzly Bay. They were, but not in the park. You weren't allowed to kill Grizzlies in the park. Okay. And bears figure that out pretty quickly. They kind of figure out where they can be hunted and where they can't.

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the first human injury happened by a grizzly bear. And that was a guy named John Dobbyn, and he was clawed by one of a trio of Grizzlies when he was hiking Pagan Pass. from what I understand it was a pretty minor incident, but one of the bears did manage to claw him. The book said he was slashed, so I'm sure he just got some cool scars in a good story.

Yeah. All right. So during this time in the early 1900s and mid-1900s, a number of historic hotels and chalets were constructed by the Great Northern Railway, including the Granite Park Chalet, which you can see behind me here in my photo. If you're listening, you can't see it, but the boys can see it. That's beautiful.

That looks pretty. Yeah. So work was also completed on the going to the Sun Road in 1932, which is considered one of the most impressive engineering accomplishments of the time. Mike, what movie pops out when you think of the going to the Sun Road? I know West knows. Legends of the Fall. No. It's the Shining.

The start of the Shining. Oh, is that? He's driving on it. Okay, yeah. Yeah. I never put two and two together there. So if you ever visit. Well, there you go.

you visit Glacier National Park in the summer, you're going to drive the going to the Sun Road, almost for sure. Also, over the top was Stallone. He drives the Senate across it. Yeah. It, two for two. That's a perfect name for that movie, considering that the going to the Sun Road literally goes over the top of a mountain pass. It's pretty impressive. Yeah, it's an amazing road. The fact that it was considered one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the time, I still consider it one of the greatest engineering accomplishments. It's truly built into like the side of a steep mountain wall all up the range and then over a pass and then all down again. You got the Egyptian pyramids and the going to sun road, neck and neck. We could talk about the going to the sun road for hours. We're not going to.

If you go to glacier in the summer, definitely drive it. It's worth your time. So also in that time, many trails were also completed. And today the park includes about 700 miles of trails. And that gives even casual visitors access to some of the most. remote and beautiful parts of the park. Me and Jeff have done a lot of backcountry hiking and glacier. We've been all over the park.

And I can't say enough about getting out in the back country because you get away from the crowds, you get this really amazing experience in one of the most beautiful places on earth. So if you get that opportunity, take it. It's amazing. Sorry, Mom. And, like, even if you don't see bears, it's, like, cool to know that there's bears around. Yeah, like you're going to see sign if you're paying attention.

They're everywhere. They're there. They're watching you. So with all these things... They're up in a tree or something. With all these things being completed, the going to the Sun Road, the hotels, the shallets, the trail system, people start coming to the park in droves. And by 1967, roughly one million people were visiting the park annually.

And around 30,000 of them were hiking into the backcountry. So the country's greatest secret is getting out. And just... Your mom is mad. For reference... It was their fault, not ours. For building all these great things. For reference, in 2019, about 3 million people visited the park.

So we're about three times the visitation that we had in 67. That's not like that much more. Yeah, that's consistent with population growth, I think. Maybe. I don't know. Do you know that, Josh? It's close. Really?

You know that stat. Sorry, we're getting off topic here. We're not actually. Speaking of population growth, in the late 60s, they're roughly a, 100 to 150 grizzly bears in the park. Today, there's around 300. So there was still a decent number of grizzly bears in the park. That's about how many are in Yellowstone National Park right now.

So it's doubled since. Yeah, but that's still for like the size of the park. Why is that? Just that conservation has gone a lot further. Like this is in the 60s is when they really started getting into grizzly conservation. And there's just been a better emphasis placed on it. So like before the 16th. these we wiped out a lot of population.

We did. And like outside of the park, there wasn't nearly as many. And those bears are rebounding. And they like filter in and out of the park. And just in general, bears are doing better than they were back then. And we're going to talk about that during the conservation section. Yeah, that's great. I love that.

Yeah. Hopefully it doubles again. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be great. I don't think we're going to get there. But maybe. All right. So as backcountry visitation increased and as grizzly bear numbers increased,

so did skirmishes with bears. So the bears are still not really habituated to human presence, and they're still almost always running away from approaching humans. But that being said, each summer there'd be a minor conflict or two between man and bear, and the park started actively managing their bears, which in the next episode, we're going to go more in depth in how bear management happened in Glacier. But this one, we're going to skip some of that information. So stay tuned for episode. And since there's not like a ton of attacks, are people like talk about. what to do in a bear attack? Not really.

Since there's no bear spray. The main thing is just like at this point in history, there's no bear spray. There's not a really great tool to stop an attacking bear. And there's also not really great science on grizzly bears yet. No one really knows what to do, including rangers that have worked with them. They know that they're kind of mean. Yeah, honestly, the people that knew best were the indigenous people. And unfortunately, like a lot of the people that ran the park and everything didn't want to listen

to indigenous people. They didn't care about the traditional history or anything when these indigenous people knew how to act around grizzly bears. So it took us a long time to like start listening to those voices that had, you know, millennia of history coexisting with these animals. So by 1967, 11 attacks had happened within the park. All had been relatively minor and no one had lost their life. So because of that, Grizzlies were viewed by most as like a non-threat. And they were an animal that was an occasionally a nuisance but not a threat to human life. In the book, Night of the Grizzlies, there's a quote from an executive ranger, and this is like one of the guys running the park, and this is what he said at the time. And just for a reference sake, Night of the Grizzlies is written in 1969. So if you do

read it, there's a lot of outdated scientific information, but there's some really interesting information about how Grizzly bears were reviewed at the time. And this is what this executive ranger said. He said, if you set up a danger index ranging from zero to 10, where the the butterfly is zero and the rattlesnake is 10, the grizzlies of Glacier National Park would have to rate somewhere between zero and one. The rattlesnake kills about 10 Americans a year. The grizzly kills none. It's foolish to talk about the grizzly menace to human life.

This is someone running the park, saying that grizzly bears are about as dangerous as a butterfly. That's kind of cool that, like, that's how grizzly bears used to be. It's crazy when you read this book. It's crazy. Yeah. That that's the sentiment between. And we're going to talk more about this on. the other attack that happened that same night, people just thought they were a nuisance. They weren't afraid of them.

They, like, would just go out and, like, kick them and do all these things to them. And they just didn't realize that this was an animal that could kill you. And that was in Glacier, like, outside of Glacier, that wasn't the case. This is kind of an interesting point to make. This kind of thinking isn't too rare. Like, by 1967, Grizzlies had killed people in Yellowstone, but they hadn't killed anyone in Glacier. And, like, even today.

There's even like a Lewis and Clark quote about how like be careful about the brown ones or something with the grizzly bears. It's that like they viewed their grizzlies as being different from other grizzlies. And that's not necessarily wrong because in some cases that is true. Like the grizzly bears of Kat my National Park are much more tolerant of other humans and other bears than grizzlies and glacier or Yellowstone. So the Katami ones are more like butterflies. Yeah, they're still not butterflies. I'm still giving them a much higher danger index, but they are a lot more tolerant than our grizzlies.

I wonder if there had ever been any butterfly incidents. Because you said 10 people had gotten into a scuffle with a bear. Maybe someone like choked on a butterfly or something. Maybe it was me when I was eating butterflies as a kid. Yeah. Anyway, in Yosemite, for example, they don't allow people to have bear spray because they've never had any big incidents with bears.

their park, but they have had a lot of bear spray incidents. So they just decided we'd rather deal with bears than with bear spray. And like that's, that's just how these things are looked at and managed. And unfortunately in this case, they got it really wrong. Grizzlies and Glacier National Park are dangerous animals. These are very territorial grizzlies. We've already, this is our third story about a grizzly bear attack in Glacier. Like, they happen. It's just that people and Grizzlies hadn't really shared the space as much as they would in the future. Unfortunately, on an August night in 1967, everyone in Glacier is about to learn the hard way just how dangerous grizzly bears can be, and that night would forever change the way that the

park service is going to view grizzlies. The Granite Park Chalet, which we briefly brought up, is situated along the Highline Trail, which is an 11-mile trail that connects Logan Pass to the lower going to the sun road. If you're driving the going to the sun road, you do this big loop. It's called the loop, and you turn and suddenly you're looking at like Bird Woman Falls and the huge range and everything. And that's right where the Highline Trail feeds in. Jeff, have you ever done the whole Highline Trail? No.

Start to finish. I've done it once. It's an amazing trail. And the chalet is really like, the chalet to me is the best part of it because you get to this beautiful chalet that sits on this rocky outcropping. There's alpine vistas everywhere. There's glacial bowls. There's wildflowers. There's mule deer.

There's mountain goats. And it just sits right at the tree. line. It's just beautiful. I couldn't picture a better spot for a chalet. There's this story from like seven years ago on the highline trail. So there's this one section that's only like, I don't know, a quarter mile long, but it's like on the cliff. And it's like the worst place you could run across a grizzly bear. And this grizzly bear walked across the trail. And like this, these people had to like rock climb to get off of the path. There's some crazy photos of them like below the bear on the tree. And this.

trail. But it's a really cool trail. You're like just on the side of a cliff for part of it. Yeah. Mike, you did a little bit of it with us this summer. On purpose? Yeah, we hiked it together. Huh. Wasn't Mike there? You remember the cliffs? Yeah, when we were like taking all the pictures on the rocks and stuff. It's like at sunset. Yeah, I thought we were just walking towards the lodge for food. No, that was the Highline Trail. We had just started. We walked like maybe a mile of it. Yeah, I'm sure it was beautiful. Yeah. Okay.

It left a big impression on Mike. Anyway, if you're walking the Highline Trail from Logan Pass, it takes you about seven and a half miles to get to the chalet. If you're walking up to the chalet from the going to the sun road, it's about four miles. And that stretch of that four miles is where Buck Wilde ran into the guy that had been killed by the bear in our last grizzly episode. So the area of the chalet is a really bare, dense area. There's a lot of bears in that area, and it's famous for having grizzlies.

I didn't know. Yeah. So the chalet was built on a large outcropping of rock, and it's typically only open to guests for about two months each year. It's really just like July and August. Generally, July 1st until Labor Day is when it's open. The rest of the year, it's almost completely buried in snowdrifts. It's built in the style of Swiss Mountain shallets as a stone facade. Fassade.

Fassade. Is a facade? Fassade. Facade. Yeah. It has a stone facade. a timbered roof and it's really charming when I went there it's really cool because you can order like some food you can sit outside or in the chalet and if you're thinking ahead it's probably

really hard to book now you can actually stay at the chalet so it has become a really popular destination for day hikers and overnight guests the building itself is 48 foot square it's two stories and it sits among subalpine fir limber pine bear grass and some wildflowers a lot of the historic foods for grizzly bears are found around the chalet and that's why it's just become such a popular spot for bears there's lots of really good food sources nearby lots of berry bushes lots of ground squirrels lots of good stuff in 1967 tom walton and his wife nancy accepted the job of managing the granite park chalet tom's going to be a big figure in our story we're going to talk about him a lot they really had no idea what they were getting into the 23-year-old

Tom was between semesters at his master's project at the University of Denver, and he was looking forward to spending a summer in one of the most beautiful places on earth with his young wife. What he wasn't really looking forward to was dealing with grizzly bears. He didn't love bears, he didn't love the idea of having to deal with them. Rangers had been flying over the chalet all that spring, and while it was buried in snow, they had seen several grizzly bears around the chalet, and on one of their flights in a helicopter, they saw six bears on the roof of the chalet so well yeah there's lots of bears around and Tom knew that and he just like really didn't want to have to deal with them but on their horseback ride up to the chalet in June the

trail's still like mostly covered with snow and they don't see any tracks so he's feeling like a little bit better and they're inside what yeah they're inside the house the call's coming from inside the house uh anyways by the time they get to the chalet they haven't seen anything and they get to work with some of the other staff on getting the chalet ready for the visitors in a few weeks. So one of Tom's jobs was to work on an incinerator that the park service had recently installed at the chalet. And the idea behind this incinerator was that the chalet created a lot of food waste and other garbage. And in the past, they historically just thrown all this food waste into a gole, like 50 yards away from the chalet. And bears would show up almost every night and

they'd eat this food waste, and it had kind of become this thing where people would go to the chalet to see the bears eating food. Kind of like what happened in Yellowstone for so long, where they're essentially just feeding bears at dumps. The chalet had become like a mini dump, and bears just knew it, and they showed up and they ate food, and they were feeding bears. But in the 60s... Yeah, I remember Krispy Cream used to do that with their donuts at the end of the day.

They just throw them out in the back. They stopped getting them. And all the bears would come. Yeah, the bears will call them. know a lot of people that do dumpster diving that will go and get really good food out of dumpsters. You know a lot? A handful. Yeah.

I know a few. I've done it before. I went and got a bunch of eggs once and some other stuff. Dumpster diving is actually kind of cool. They were like untouched and not expired. Anyway. We all have that dream trip. We've been wishing we could go on.

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learn to start doing natural food again. Bears are like, where's our food guys? Yeah, exactly. But it's important because bears need to be able to, you know, act like bears. And when they're eating human food, they're becoming food conditioned. And that causes them to take risks they typically wouldn't take. And it puts humans and bears in danger. So the park service recognized this and they started to close down all these feeding opportunities.

And part of that was putting an incinerator at the chalet. And the idea was instead of throwing this food out, they would burn it all. and when Tom showed up, he realized that the incinerator they installed was much smaller than the one they had anticipated, and it could hardly even handle the waste from just the staff. And Tom knew that there was going to be lots of people coming to the chalet, and there'd be no way that the incinerator would work for that many people. So he knew it was going to be a problem, and he also was worried about the bears showing up because of that. But he had grown up in Idaho. he knew that bears were unpredictable. He really didn't want them around.

So he was kind of trying to figure out a way to handle this problem with the incinerator. And he started burning food in a barrel. And when he did that, the bears showed up and knocked the barrel over and ate it. And he didn't see him. But they started seeing tracks around the chalet every night. And they would see all these. So he views them as more dangerous than a butterfly. Yeah.

He sees them as like a nuisance at this point. And he thinks that they're dangerous. But then every night they're seeing tracks around the chalet, and every night they're seeing a bunch of tracks, and then they see a big set of female tracks with two cubs. And every night they're seeing those same ones. So the chalet opens on July 1st, and within a week, guests are starting to arrive regularly. By mid-July, the incinerator can't keep up with the amount of garbage they're producing. He tries this barrel thing. The bears flip it over, destroy it.

And they have a meeting, and they just decide they're going to start doing things the way they used to. they're just going to throw the trash out behind this goalie and they're just going to let the bears eat it. Within a few nights, the bears start showing up regularly. So there's tracks from a lot of different bears. They're seeing a lot of different bears, but they never see the female in two cubs, even though they see her tracks every single night.

But they see other bears. They do. So after a few days... She's sneaky. Yeah, she's sneaky. After a few days, a pattern starts to emerge, though. There's this large, blondeish grizzly that shows up and a large, dark-colored grizzly that show up.

They kind of, like, fight a little. bit with each other, they threaten each other, and then they cautiously kind of both pick at the food. And while they're picking at it, a third small light-colored grizzly would like run up the draw and like catapult itself into the food pile and just start eating as quick as possible before these other two bears. Leroy Jenkins. Exactly. Before these other two bears would like swat it and then the bear would, this smaller bear would run off and wait until the big bears are done. And then it would come

back in and eat some scraps. So that's what's going on for a while. It's happening like clockwork every night. As soon as it starts getting dark, the bears would show up. And it got so predictable that Tom could be like, or he would say in 10 minutes the bears will be here and in 10 minutes they were there. It's like it was like clockwork. And at this point, because these bears are so predictable and because they're just eating

food and leaving and they kind of are assigning personalities to the different bears, he's starting to lose his fear of the bears. He's starting to just kind of see them as like a night. attraction and they're just kind of, you know, they're there for the food and that's it. He kind of likes them now. Kind of, but he still sees them as just, he sees them as annoying, but not so much as a big danger. Yeah.

So word starts to get out that these bears are showing up every night and the chalet starts to become completely packed every single night. Be cool. A room and three. Yeah, it would. A room and three meals at the chalet costs about 1250 in 1967 and that's a pretty good bargain. So people are showing up. They want to stay there.

There's 12 guest rooms in the chalet, each has two to six bunks. But that summer in 1967, it was typical for there to be many more guests than there were beds. So to make room, they would just literally spread mattresses, extra mattresses out on the floor. And people would just sleep on the floor of like the dining room and stuff. And they could pack like eight to ten people in more that way. And they would just be packed in like sardines. It sounded really funny. Tell scary stories and stuff.

Yeah, like every night they would sing, I've been working on the railroad. and they'd sing it together. This is 1967, and they would all, like, there was no alcohol in the lodge, but they would all just kind of stay up, partying and talking and watching the bears and singing. And, like, you're up in the middle of the mountains. It gets really euphoric and giddy.

People really just had an amazing time at the chalet. It sounds like late 60s at the Granite Park Chalet sound like a really good time. Yeah. Like, I'd love to go back in time and hang out. Is that what it's like, at like your polar bear get-togethers that you do in Alaska? You guys just sing songs all night.

No. It's a little grimmer. Jimmy crack corn, all that, yeah. So guests often included rangers and ranger naturalists and other park personnel, including park executives, and they would stay at the chalet and a handful of them witnessed this nightly bear feeding. And even though this practice directly violated all the new rules of the park about not feeding bears and not feeding wildlife,

they didn't really say anything to Tom Walton or to any of the other chalet staff finally one day a high-ranking official finally says to Tom he says Tom you stop feeding those bears and Tom says okay and the official also told him to start burning the trash in the incinerator and Tom agrees but he doesn't really take the command seriously and his boss who worked for the concession people in the park told him just to keep putting out the trash like to keep doing what they were doing. He said no one really meant it. And to be honest, they felt like they didn't have a better alternative. And really in the park. Maybe like one of those things like the boss does so that he's not guilty of something liable. Yeah.

It's like, yeah. I know it's impossible for you to do this, but you have to burn the food. Right. And at this point, I think the people that were telling them like every once in a while Rangers lodging a complaint or there's this official saying something. and I think they were worried that something at the chalet would get destroyed and they would be in trouble, you know, or whatever. They weren't thinking people are going to get killed by a grizzly because it had never happened and everyone just thought the grizzlies there were tame. And so no one really made a big deal out of it because it didn't seem like a big deal.

And everyone kind of enjoyed this bear feeding too. Like it was, I mean, people were going up there to watch it, including Rangers. So no one takes it seriously. And by August, the whole park knows about the feeding. several rangers had filed objections, but like I said, they're mostly just going through the motions. No one forces them to stop feeding the bears. So at this point, in August, the lineup of bears has changed a little bit, and at this point it's two grizzlies that are showing up every night. One's this large, dark-colored silver-tip male, so that might have been one of the other ones

that have been showing up before. And then the other one is another really large male, but it's much older looking. It has a pretty ragged coat, and it has long. claws. Often if you see a grizzly bear that has really long claws, it could be a grizzly bear that's starting to eat a lot of human food because they're no longer using their claws to like dig for roots or dig for like ground squirrels or dig for termites or bugs or anything like that. They're not really digging much anymore because they're getting food a lot easier. So their claws just start to grow out really long. So that is a telltale sign of a grizzly that's food condition as they have really long claws. Same with you when you're feeling.

The males are getting long. You're not digging as much as you used to be. You should see Wes's backyard. He's just got holes all over the place. Yeah, there's holes everywhere. I'm a digger. Looking for bugs to eat. I'm never going to live that down.

Yeah, if you guys want to know what we're talking about, listen to our Goonch episode on Patreon. Wes ate a lot of bugs as a kid. So, these two males would show up. Usually this larger big silver-tip male that looked a lot healthier, show up first. Silver tip? Oh, like its color. Yeah, like a silver tip grizzlies one that's dark and then it has the like kind of blondeish tips on its hair. They're like, I think the prettiest looking of all the grislies. They're just really beautiful. But this larger male would show up first, he would start eating.

And then when this like slightly smaller, really old looking raggedy male would show up, he would stop eating and let this older male eat first, which seemed kind of backwards to the people. and once they even fought and the big silver-tip male completely dominated the other bear, but when they stopped fighting, it still let the other bear eat first. So it was kind of a weird dominance structure between these two bears. Yeah. And the really interesting thing is that every night, they still found tracks from the female and the two cubs. But they hadn't ever seen her?

No one is seen her. Is that one that just dives on the pile still coming? No, I don't think so. At this point, it's really just these other two bears and the female with cubs. So in the summer of 1967, it's a really hot and dry summer in Glacier National Park. And by August, all of the snow was gone from the chalet. All the glaciers are dried up. That's happening.

But, yeah, I mean, this is probably the start of that. And they're having really hot 90-degree days and fires are starting to break out all over the park. So a lot of these rangers who are typically concerning themselves with, you know, day-to-day stuff in the park are out fighting fires. instead of, you know, dealing with little problems. And no one's really keeping track on the increasing number of close shaves that are happening at the Granite Park Chalet. Hikers that are going back and forth between the chalet at night are stumbling upon bears on the trails at night.

And they're having some really close calls. But lucky for them, these bears are so focused on getting to that food source that they're not really paying attention to the people. But people are like practically stepping on these bears at night. And no one's really paying attention because everyone's busy fighting for. fire. So one night, Bert Gildart, who was a seasonal ranger, and Dave Shea, who was a 21-year-old assistant park biologist, decided to go up to the chalet to see the bears. And I want you guys to remember those names for episode two. Something's telling me they're going to get a

up-close view of these bears. Yeah, we'll see. You're going to, they're going to see something that no one's seen so far. So they watch the two big males eat the garbage, and then they're like feeling a little uneasy about all this. They're not sure why this has been going on for so long and why people are letting them feed bears. And around midnight, they just came up for the day. And around midnight, they decide they're going to hike back down to their cars. And they're both seasoned people in the park. They're not too worried about bears. They have flashlights and stuff and they decide to hike back down. And as they're hiking down and they come around the chalet, who do they see? But the female with the two cubs eating the scraps that are left over. They're the first ones to see her.

You got it right. Good job. Hey. And they'll accept my award later. The whole way down, they're talking about how this is a problem. And they just, but they both are like. Like it's a problem that bears are on the trail and like. That they're being fed.

Yeah. But neither of them really know what they could do. And again, at this time, there's not a lot of bear science. No one really knows yet just how dangerous it is to feed bears, aside from probably the Native Americans that live in that area. Yeah. So it's a huge problem, but no one's really picked up on it yet. And in a few days, these two men, again, are going to be personally witness to some really unspeakable tragedy.

So we're going to fast forward to the morning of the night of the grislies. Mike, can you make a fast forward noise with your mouth? That's pretty good. Yeah, he's still going. All right. So August 12th, 1967, Julie Helgeson and her. like park boyfriend, I'm doing quotation marks, Roy Duccott hitchhiking. It's like a summer camp girlfriend.

It kind of is. Yeah. And like a lot of these park employees are young kids from all over the country. And I worked in the national park. I saw it happen firsthand. A lot of people hook up for the summer or whatever and then they're, you know, done. But she's with her park boyfriend, Roy Dukot. They hitchhike in the back of a pickup truck to the top of Logan Pass.

And this little couple was planning on hiking the beautiful highline trip. and sleeping at Granite Park Chalet. Romantic. Julie Helges. What? That's romantic. It is. It sounds really nice.

It sounds like a fun little trip. In the 60s, you know, summer of love. I think they're going to make it as a couple. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't put any bets on it. I'll bet you. Okay, I'll take that bet. I'll bet you $100.

I'll bet you a dollar. That they make it as a couple. Virtual handshake. But the bet is that they make it as a couple. What's that mean? Like until they die, there. A couple. No, I'm not taking that bad.

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Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. So I'm going to tell you guys something. I'm pretty close to this story now. I feel connected to these people. I'm going to try and not let that seep out too much while I'm telling the story. But this is a sad one.

It's a really sad one. But I just want you to, I'm going to do my best not to get too worked up about it because it's a tough one. And it happened so long ago that it's like, it's really interesting to me. But having spent like days and days reading about these people and watching all these things and I like, I feel like I almost know them.

So it's like, I don't think it's like too sensitive of a story, but for me, it's going to be a little sensitive. Okay. Julie Helgeson is 19. She's in her sophomore year at the University of Minnesota. She's smart.

She's friendly. She's pretty. She enjoys a wide range. of activities. She's like a cheerleader. She's a singer in her choir. She's part of student government. She's like just an all-American late 60s, pretty nature-loving, beautiful girl. Her father described her as a beautiful bubbling girl. She has a deepest interest in nature and she leaves for the summer to spend it as an employee in Glacier National Park. She's working in the East Glacier Lodge laundry. So back in the day, the park had a rule that all employees younger than 21 were required

in their contracts to call their parents that they planned on camping overnight in the park and get permission from their parents. So that morning, she calls her folks to let them know she's heading out to go camping. It is weird. Her parents had just visited her in the park two days earlier. They had this wonderful trip with their daughter and they saw how well she was doing in the park, how confident she was. So they quickly gave her permission to go. camping with Roy. Her companion is this guy, Roy Ducott. He's 18.

He's from Ohio. He's also a sophomore at Bowling Green State University, a different university than Julie. He's smart. He's hardworking. He's in great physical shape, and he felt like he could outhike any of his friends or any of his coworkers. He's also working at the East Glacier Lodge, but he's a bus boy. The two had met at the lodge, and they'd quickly formed this really fun summer

relationship. A little summer fling, you know? Yeah. So the same day, Joan Devereaux was a ranger naturalist. So essentially it was like today's interpretive rangers would be this thing. Like they go out and they tell people about the park. They help them with questions. And sometimes they do little tours.

And she was leading her first ever tour group through the Highline Trail. So this is still a fairly sexist time in the history of the National Park Service. And a lot of the female rangers weren't allowed to do these kind of things previously. like take large tour groups out. And this is her first time ever doing it. And the main reason she's doing it is because most of the men are out fighting fires. So they let Joan lead her first group along the High Line Trail. But she's really experienced and she's really confident.

And she's going to be a really key figure in our story. But she sets out on the High Line Trail with 36 people that day. 36? Yeah. Her expertise was in botany. Their plan was to like walk the trail, stay at the chalet and have a really great tour. Yeah. She confidently leads them along this trail.

And once they get to the chalet, she's answering questions from all the different tour people. She's helping them with, you know, whatever they need help with. And she's kind of nervously waiting on this bear feeding because she'd heard about it. And she wasn't too keen on it. She thought it was like a thing that shouldn't be happening in the park. But at the same time, like any of us, she wants to see some bears. So she's like kind of nervous about it, but also kind of excited for it. While she waited, she meets this young couple who shows.

up on the trail named Klein. Their last name's Klein. And they were actually planning on camping in the brand new granite park campground a bit down the hill. So she points them in the right direction. And then as she does it, she somewhat jokingly warns them about grizzly bears. Again, like at this time, grizzly bears are just kind of like, watch out for grizzly bears. Like people know that they're dangerous, but not so much in glacier.

So they're kind of like, oh, grizzly bears. Yeah. You know? And the clines aren't thrilled about this. As they start walking away from Joan, they start walking away from Joan. they start fighting because Janet is like the wife Janet Klein is pretty terrified of bears. Yeah. She's kind of bar, she's kind of bar annoyed.

And she knows that grizzly bears are big and that they're like a threat. And her husband, Robert, is six foot seven and he's still like, he's like a big imposing guy. He's not able to ease their fears at all. And she finally tells them like, I'm not sleeping outside. I'm sleeping in the chalet. So when they arrived in Glacier, they've talked to a friend who was like this really respected ranger in the park. And he gave him like the basic bear safety talk of the time.

And they asked him like, what do we do if we confront an aggressive grizzly? And he tells him like, there's not really a set thing to do. And he says, run for a tree. And if they couldn't find one, he says,

and I quote, just roll up into the fetal position and take whatever the bear dishes out. So it's bad advice. It's pretty bad advice. It's not completely wrong, but it's not right. And we're going to talk about in the what would Mike and Jeff do and, you know, what you actually should do. We're going to go over again what you should do. But this isn't it.

Both of those things could work, but they're not necessarily what you're supposed to do. Okay. But in 1967 without bear spray, getting up a tree isn't the worst option. Yeah. But, you know, and he even said, like, there's not really a set thing and there really wasn't at the time. So they had met several other people on the trail who warned them about the bears near the chalet, and the sphere had really sunk in for Janet, and he finally, like, submits to her and says, fine, we'll go up to the chalet, we'll look for a bunk.

So when they get to the chalet, they meet Tom Walton, who again is the guy who's managing the chalet, and Tom tells them, unfortunately, all the bunks are sold, and that they could sleep on the floor and get the three meals for $25. So remember, like a bunk cost $12.50, and they're charging, like, overflow people $25. bucks, which kind of sounds like a bit of a racket. But this is a lot more money than they planned on spending. And so they end up asking Tom about the bears. And Tom says two bears show up every night.

They come from the campground direction and they leave in that direction. But he says hundreds of people have camped in the campground over the summer. And he jokingly says no one's been eaten yet. And unfortunately, like he's like, hundreds of people have been camping there and no one's been eaten yet, you know. He kind of says it like sarcastically, and the crazy thing is he wouldn't be able to say that the next day. Robert at this point, the husband of the Klein's, he feels comfortable staying in the campground, but Janet's like more scared than ever.

She wants to pony up the $25. So they're kind of disagreeing, and Robert decides to go on a little solo hike to think about it. He's going to go pout. When he returns, Janet introduces him to a guy she met named Don Golet, and Don's a 20-year-old hiker from California, and he's not worried. about the bears at all. He's been hiking through the Rockies. He hasn't had any problems. And he's planning on sleeping next to this really small trail cabin that Trail Cruise had built. And he's going to use it as like kind of a makeshift shelter. He's not going to sleep inside of it, but he's going to

sleep right next to it. And Janet finally agrees that if they sleep next to this trail cabin close to dawn, that they can sleep outside. And they don't have to spend the 50 bucks or whatever to sleep in the, Oh, you know what? He's probably saying $25 for both of them. That just dawned on me. A combo deal. And they didn't have to spend the $25 to sleep on the floor. That finally calms their down enough,

and Robert agrees that they can sleep right next to the trail cabin. So this trail cabin, it's important just to kind of visualize this. From the chalet, it's about a 10-minute walk down to the trail cabin. And then the campground that they recently built is about a couple hundred yards away from this trail cabin. So you can't see the tube. between them, but you could hear someone and the other one if they were like yelling loud enough. So. I wonder why we need to know that.

Yeah, it's important to know it. As they're spreading out their sleeping bags, they're approached by Roy Ducott and Julie Helgeson, the two couple, the couple that we talked about earlier. Again, Roy is 18, Julie's 19, and they're just arriving to the trail cabin. So Roy and Julie are just like in great spirits. They've had a beautiful hike. It's like Young Love. they're just super happy to get there.

So when they show up, they run into this trio. They run in the Clines and Dawn. And they ask them like, why are you sleeping near the cabin? Like the campground's right down there. And they bring up the bears. And Roy and Julie just laugh at them. And they're like, bears are nothing to worry about. And they skip off to the campground.

So it's about 8 p.m. When Roy and Julie lay their sleeping bags out, they eat some food from their packs. They're just having like this near perfect day. It's young puppy love. the evening's perfect. It's like a beautiful night, but they knew it was going to be chilly, so they ended up sleeping in their clothes.

And the two are chatting in their sleeping bags for a bit before they fall asleep under these really beautiful bright stars of a Montana summer night. I've been in that situation. It's wonderful. Like sleeping out under the stars in Montana is just, it's like magical. It is. I love it.

I've never had a girlfriend when I did it, but it's probably even better. But the solace that I can take in this, is that these two had a really magical day. Up at the chalet, the nightly bear feeding is happening. The bears show right up. They show up at dark. They're out there.

They're eating the food. Everyone's gathered. And we're going to go over a few of the characters that are at the chalet because a lot of these characters are going to play into the rest of the story. It's like an Agatha Christie story. It kind of is. Yeah. We talked about the Waltons and the rest of the staff.

And we talked about Joan Devereaux, the young ranger naturalist. Some other people that were there was Dr. Lyndon. So he's a medical doctor who's now a professor of medicine at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. And when I say now, I mean in 1967. He was originally from Latvia and he had lived all over Europe and Russia. So he had a really hard accent to pin down. But he was super interesting. He'd once walked from France to Portugal.

So across France and Spain and into Portugal. Wow. In order to escape the Nazis. Oh, cool. He also practiced medicine in Africa, and he had crossed the Sahara. And he was joined by his teenage son. I don't know. Yeah, I didn't really say why he crossed the Sahara.

But they were up there. He was joined by his teenage son, Nicholas. The Reverend Thomas Connolly was there. He was 38, and he was a Jesuit priest who had spent most of his career working with indigenous people of the Northwest. And it sounds like he was actually like a really cool person as far as. the good that he did among these tribes. A lot of them had lived in some pretty insane poverty, and he set up community centers and all these different kind of institutions in these indigenous communities to help these people. And when he set up a community center in Spokane, he met Steve Pierre,

who was an indigenous man, he was a member of the Calispell tribe, and he worked as a counselor in this center. And the two became friends, and they would spend their free time hiking and enjoying the wilderness. And on that night when the bears were being fed, both of them thought it was pretty gross. And neither of them wanted to watch. And Steve, who was this indigenous guy, said, stupid white people, they don't even know what they're doing. Like, he knew they were playing with fire. And they went to bed without even watching the show, which, you know, I know this is like a terrible thing. I still probably would have watched.

And then I would have been like, hey, by the way, that needs to stop, like today. Yeah, good on them for naive participating. Yeah. So another person that was there was John Lepinski, and he's going to be really important. He was there with his wife, Anne, their 16-year-old daughter, Terese, and their son's Robin, who was five, and Carl, who was four. John was a surgeon who lived in nearby Calispell, and Anne was a nurse. And the couple was so busy that they hardly ever had time to get out. This was like a really rare trip for them to the park, even though it was only a mile away. So we've got a surgeon. A mile? Oh, sorry, an hour away, instead of a mile. Yeah. We've got a surgeon, we've got a medical doctor, and there's also, there's an Air Force medic there too. So there's three doctors in the chalet, which is really fortunate. So, Anne Lepinski is also really barrenoid. She is, like, unable to sleep.

I'm not just, I just want to make sure that's a good enough pun that people realize you're saying paranoid. Paranoid of bears. She's worried about bears. It also kind of sounds like annoyed of bears, barrenoid. Oh, yeah, I get it. Yeah. Okay. She's paranoid.

She's worried about hers. We're portmanteaus are always really, really good. It works. I like the pun. I just want to make sure everyone gets it. Yeah, I created that one myself. So do what you will with it. I'll leave it here on this episode.

I'm not going to really take it after this, I don't think. But I like it. I'll copyright it for you before we post. So no one else can steal it. She realizes in her bunk room, there's only one door separating it from outside and she's having these visions of like a thousand pound grizzly knocking down the door and eating her entire family and they've lived in callospell for a while so she knows that bears can be dangerous and she doesn't really buy into this harmless bear reputation that grizzlies have

urdening glacier so as they're drifting asleep she can't calm her mind down and she spends the first part of the night like really worrying until she finally starts to become drowsy and she finally starts to fall asleep when suddenly a muffled woman's scream jolt her back awake. So she hears a scream and she shakes her husband awake and she says she heard a scream and that she's worried that a woman was being attacked by one of the other visitors in the bathrooms because the scream that she heard came from the general direction of where the bathrooms were. So she tells John that she thinks someone's being killed in the bathrooms. And John kind of lazily wakes up and he tells her that she's just, you know, being crazy and that she needs to go back to sleep.

So Anne starts second-guessing herself, and she figures maybe like her brain that had been running through all these different scenarios all night was getting the best of her. And she starts to lay back down when suddenly she hears the scream a second time. So she wakes John back up and she says, he's already asleep again? Yeah, he already falls back asleep. She says, hey, I heard the scream again. And again, he tells her just to go back to sleep. So she lays back down on her pillow, but at this point she's sure what she's heard. Like she's not second-guessing herself anymore.

And she's trying to figure out a way to convince John when a loud piercing scream like shatters the silence in the room. And John's on his feet. And so is Anne. They both know what they heard at this point. They're like, that was a scream. And they're getting ready. They're putting on their clothes. And they rush out onto the chalet balcony just in time to hear the scream say, get out, get away from me.

So this is a woman screaming, like, I'm not doing it justice. She's screaming at the top of her lungs, like, to get out, get out, get away from me. Yeah. They're there just listening. They think she's being attacked by someone. And seconds later, they hear her scream, God help me. He's stabbing me. And then God help me, someone help me.

So they're like hearing this screaming and they don't know what's going on. They figure someone's being stabbed in the bathrooms. So at this point, Terese, their daughter, their 16-year-old daughter, she's the only member of the Lipinski family that's totally dressed. So she goes down to the common area and she starts like waking people up trying to find someone that could help her. And they assume someone's being murdered. So she's pretty frantic. And she finds the room of Joan Devereaux, the Ranger naturalist.

And she knocks loudly on the door and Joan appears like all groggy. And Teresa tells her what she's heard and Joan tells her that she's just been dreaming and to go back to bed. But Teresa is insisting and she reluctantly gets Joan to like, get dressed to turn on her shortwave radio just in case. So Joan and Therese then go to one of the staff members. They tell her what Teresa and the rest of Lippinski's heard. And the staff member goes to wake up Tom Walton, who again is like the manager of the chalet. So Tom wakes up to banging on his door at 1245 and he's wondering like, what the hell is going on?

And he yells through the door at the staff member who's waking him up. And the staff member yells back and said someone had reported a girl being murdered outside in the darkness. So Tom's pissed. He can't believe someone's waking him up for nonsense. He tells the staff member to handle it and just tell everyone to go back to bed. But the staff member tells him that she's not able to calm down the Lepinski's and that they insisted they heard what they heard. So Tom finally gets dressed and he joins the Lepinski's and Joan, the Ranger naturalist,

out on the balcony. And it's a really quiet night and Tom's not hearing anything. He's grumpy. He's mad that he's out there. it's like almost 1 a.m. And he's just like ready to go to bed when John Lipinski says, how about we yell down there and see if anyone responds? So Tom's like, fine, go for it.

And John cups his hands to his face and he yells, Is everything okay? And they wait a second and they finally hear a thin male voice in the direction of the campground. And it responds one word. It says, no. And so John yells out again. He says, what's the trouble?

And all they hear back is one word. and it's bare. Ugh. So they're getting pretty freaked out. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings,

Not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. So Roy Ducott is asleep in his sleeping bag, and he wakes up to an absolutely terrified Julie Helgeson. She's whispering something through her teeth. He's the straining to hear. No, Roy's the one that worked in East Glacier. Yeah, he's 18. So he wakes up to an absolutely terrified Julie Helgeson. She's whispering something through her teeth that he's totally straining to hear, and he finally hears it, and what she's saying is play dead. So just as the words sink in

What he's hearing He finds himself flying through the air Oh man That's hard to play dead Yeah The world smells musty It smells sour Jeff you've smelled bears

Like they smell like Like wet dog kind of It can be pretty smelly That's what he's smelling And like I've caught a couple Grizzly bears this summer They smell a lot worse than black horse They're really stinky

Yeah And he's flying through the air He doesn't really know what's happening Or what he's smelling And he looks over And Julie's also fly through the air. Jeez.

And what had launched them through the air was a single swipe from the paw of this big grizzly man. So Roy lands on his stomach and he raises his head to see Julie about five feet away when suddenly he feels teeth sink into the flesh of his shoulder and scrape against his bone. And somehow he managed to remain completely still and motionless and not make a sound while this bear starts biting into his shoulder. And it stops and it turns and goes towards Julie who's screaming. She's five feet away, and he watches as the bear starts just ripping away at Julie's body.

And then almost to his relief, it stops ripping at her and turns back to him. And Roy feels feet plant into his lower back, and then once again he feels the teeth of the bear, this time tear into his left arm and into the back of his legs just below his butt. Later when he's remembering this, he talks about the horrible stench of the bear's breath, and somehow he managed to stay quiet again. and once again the bear leaves him and returns to Julie. It's got to be some pretty bad breath if you're going to remark. Right.

You notice it. If your leg is missing. Your leg is getting chew on. It's crazy how often that comes up. In almost every bear attack, people comment on how bad the bear's breast smells. So yeah, it's got to be just god awful.

So the last thing Roy hears from Julie was the sounds of her bones crunching and the girl screaming it hurts. but the screams were getting quieter and Roy comes to this horrible realization that the bear's carrying her away. So he knows he needs to do something and even though he had been pretty chewed up

by this bear, he gets to his feet and he immediately remembers that there's these people sleeping by the trail cabin. So he runs up to the trail cabin and he collapses at the foot of the first sleeping bag that he sees. So Don Gola, if you remember Don Gullet's the 20-year-old

who was like hiking through the Rockies from California. He's sleeping at the base of the trail cabin, and he's sleeping this really deep sleep that you only get after hiking 20 miles when he feels something moving at the foot of his sleeping bag. And it's around 1 a.m. and he looks out in the dark night, and he sees the shape of a person on its feet. And then the person collapses to his knees and then falls flat on the ground. And then he hears in the darkness this babbling, almost giggling voice of Roy Duccott. And the boy, like this is the guy he met five hours earlier. And he's here. He's here.

hearing Roy saying that a bear had got him and Julie, that playing dead hadn't worked, and that Don should forget about him and go help Julie, who had been dragged away into the brush. A crazy thing about this whole story, every single person that talks to Roy over the next couple hours, all he says to them is forget about me, go find Julie. Like, that's all he can say. Wow. Committed for a summer relationship.

Yeah, he's like, he's a really brave dude. So, initially, Don, who woke up to him. this boy saying this stuff at the foot of his sleeping bag, thought that he was like getting pranked and that these kids were just kind of being dickheads. So he's like trying to come to and as his eyes adjust to the dark, he looks up at Roy, who's now standing up again, and he sees that his arm is dangling loose in its socket, and he sees that he's just covered in blood.

And he's like, okay, I'm not being prank. He's like, this is a good prank. Yeah, exactly. This dude is committed. Yeah. So 10 minutes earlier, Janet and Robert Klein, the couple who's sleeping near the trail cabin, Janet had been woken up by what she thought was a mountain lion attacking a deer. She was hearing screams and they sounded so primal that she thought they had to be coming from a mountain lion or some kind of animal that was dying because she couldn't be human.

And then suddenly these screams, in the middle of the scream, she starts hearing words. And the words that she hears are, help me and mommy, mommy. So she then starts to think there must be a kid at the campground who's having a nightmare and they're just having like a full on night terror or something. And she turns and Robert's starting to wake up and he asks her like what's making that noise and she says, I don't know. And then the screams start up again and they again hear the voice pleading for help for her mommy and they couldn't remember a family coming into the campground

and they're like wondering if maybe someone showed up after they fell asleep. The screams continue, but now they're getting quieter as though they were like heading away. And now they're like, okay, something's definitely wrong. And it's not an animal, someone's being hurt. And they really are trying to figure out what to do. And they don't have much time to think about it because then Don shows up with Roy. So Don's, again, the hiker and Roy's the kid who's been mauled. Roy is full of panic and he can't stop repeating that the bear had gotten Julie and that someone had to help her.

So Janet and Robert quickly get on the roof of the trail cabin and they try and yell for help and Don wraps Roy up in his sleeping bag and lays the boy on the ground. They knew that Roy could die from blood loss and they needed to get help soon, but they were also aware of the fact that Julie could be alive somewhere out there in the dark. So Robert starts flashing his flashlight at the chalet

trying to get their attention that way and they're like not getting any attention or anything but then after a few minutes they hear a voice yell out Is everyone okay? And it's John Lipinski who had been calling out earlier. Yeah. And again, Robert replies no. And then they ask what's happening and Robert yells out, bear.

In the chalet, Tom Walton's getting a group together to go check out the screams. He's irritated because at this point, he thinks it's just that Janet woman who he knows, like, really paranoid about bears. And that the bears had showed up and she's just like scared. So he's getting a group together to go check out the screams. And again, he's irritated because he thinks. thinks it's just this woman who's like overreacting, but he has to go check it out. So with them were Father Connolly, the native guy, Steve Pierre, the doctors, Lepensky and Ladan, Joan Devereaux, and some other staff and guests.

In total of the 13 people. And the native guy said, he was like, hey, one of the only things this bear is going to hate is fire. So he finds this galvanized tub and puts some wood in it, lights a fire, and they carry it like a little improvised stretcher with them. So they've got like a moving little bonfire with them. This dude to me is the hero of the whole thing, this native guy, Steve. And Tom is mad still.

Tom's tired. Tom's a tired, Timmy. So Tom's still irritated that they're on this wild goose chase. When he rounds the corner, he sees the trail cabin and like all the pandemonium and his eyes fall on the mangled body of Roy. And he instantly knows that he's been completely wrong and that a grizzly had actually. The total horror movie, like, cliche where they don't believe it until they see it. And then they suddenly are like, oh, shit, I was wrong.

So both the doctors immediately go to work on Roy. Again, like Lipinski and Ladan are both there. They're both the doctors. And they're trying to patch his gaping wounds with like this really meager first aid kit that the clients gave them. Roy continues just to beg everyone he sees to forget about him and to go help Julie. But both doctors know that they have a responsibility. to treat Roy first because they don't even know where Julie is. And that's how doctors do it, especially in triage.

It's like you treat the victim you have. You don't worry about the one that you don't even know if you're going to be able to rescue them. So they go into the trail cabin and they get some bedsprings and they like make an improvised stretcher out of it and they put Roy on it. And then half of these rescuers, including Dr. Lipinski, who's the surgeon, leave with Roy and they head back to the chalet and they actually get lost on the way. And this should be a 10-minute hike, and it takes them 30 minutes instead. The other half of the rescue group stays behind, and that includes Joan Devereaux,

and she's frantically trying to use her radio to get help. And she finally gets through, and she talks to Bert Gildart, who we talked about earlier, and he patches her through to one of the main rangers that's on command. She frantically tells them that there's been a mauling, and then with the help of Dr. Ladan, the guy who's from France and all these different places, and like Latvia, they tell the ranger what they need as far as medical supplies. And the ranger tells them he's sending a helicopter and that he's coming up with a rifle. After she gets off the radio, Joan finds that like the rest of the people who stayed behind,

they're all looking at her. She's the only one in a ranger outfit. She's kind of like the de facto authority at this point. And remember, she's 22 years old. She's like new at the park. She doesn't really know what she's doing. But she really steps into this role and she really just takes charge of everything. And everyone's thinking that they need to go find Julie.

So she's thinking for a minute and then she calmly and authoritatively says, we're not going to look for Julie. They're not going to walk blindly into the woods and they're going to go back into the chalet and wait for help. So some of the people don't like this news. Dr. Ladan is one of them. Him and Tom Connolly, the priest, are like, nope, we're going to go look for. There's nothing in this world. it's going to stop us. We're going to go look for this girl. We're going to find her. And Tom,

the manager of the chalet, agrees with Joan. And he's like, no, we need to go back to the chalet. We need to wait for help. And at this point, he's, like, terrified of bears. And he knows what they can do. And they've seen it firsthand. Now they're looking at Roy. And he gets very vocal about saying, we need to go back to the chalet. So finally, after, like, a lot of convincing Dr. Ladan and Father Conley decide that they'll go back to the chalet with everyone else. Their flashlights are starting to die. They just decide they need to go back. And when they give it back there, Dr. Lipinski's in the middle of treating Roy's wounds. So back at the chalet, Jones reiterating that going out and trying to save Julie is a suicide mission and that all they have is a tub full of some fire and some

kitchen knives. And Dr. Ladan and Father Conley are busy trying to recruit other men to go look for Julie. And Joan intercepts him and she says, no, she's responsible. No one's responsible. No one's going to look for Julie and she insists they wait for help and Tom is still agreeing with her. So I want to read a little bit from the book quickly about Tom and what he's saying at this point and how much his tune has kind of changed. He says, okay, we've got to be realistic about this. There could be 50 of us going down there and the bear could gobble all of us up. We have no idea where she is. We don't even know where they were sleeping and all we've got to defend ourselves with is the fire. If the bear's really riled up, the fire won't stop him.

Sure, this man is a priest, maybe he's got some protection from above, but I'm not so sure that I do. I have no reason to believe that the bear won't eat me and everyone else. And once again, he said aloud, you're not going. Nobody's going down there. It's stupid. So he's like, he suddenly is like, nope, this bear could eat all 50 of us if it wanted, which is not true. Yeah. I'm really torn on this.

I feel like a big enough group should go look for. I think without deterrent, you are taking a risk of someone getting really hurt. but I also know that bears don't like attacking groups of people and like they won't. But at the time they didn't really know that and they weren't sure, you know, what you can do to stop a grizzly attack. They saw that Roy had been all mangled and probably the more responsible thing to do is to wait for help, to wait for someone with the gun. But knowing what I know now, I 100% would go look for with a group of people without a doubt.

There's no doubt in my mind. That's what I'd do. Knowing what they knew back then, it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to, to judge that decision. But Joan made that decision, she really stuck to it. And I do credit her for that. She didn't waver and she was the authority figure they all needed. I guess.

So it would be about 20 to 30 minutes. I mean, it's true. I mean, not that Julie needed necessarily. I know. It would be about 20 to 30 minutes before the helicopter did show up. And instead of looking for the girl, they got ready, getting a landing site ready for the helicopter. So when the helicopter landed, they realized that, like, in the rush of leaving, they

forgot the needle they needed to give Roy Ducotte some inner venous blood. So he's like missing muscle and tendons and he has deep lacerations all over his body. But his most serious problem is that he's lost a lot of blood. So they didn't have a way to give him blood up there. So what they had to do is load him on the helicopter and fly him to Callispell. So they load Royd on the helicopter, the ranger with the gun gets off and they take a bunch of medical supplies off of the helicopter. So Gary Bunny is the name of this ranger, and he tells Joan to stay on the radio and stay at the chalet, and that he would lead a group of men down to look for Julie. So Joan's sitting at a table in the dining room, and while she's sitting there, this Air Force medic comes up to her,

and he approaches her and said, I'm sure you're aware of this already, but I need to tell you something. And she says, what's that? And he says, the boy was in bad shape, but the girl's going to be a lot worse. And he wasn't wrong. So Gary Bunny and the rest of the men begin the rescue mission around 245, two hours after the attack first happened. He's armed with the 300 Winchester Magnum, but it's incredibly dark outside, and there's really almost no chance that he's going to be able to get a shot off at this bear if they see it.

So he's joined by Father Conley, Steve Pierre, Tom Walton, Robert Klein, Dr. Lindann, and Don Gollett, and then about 10 other people that aren't named. I can't imagine how scary this would be. Like, people have been mauled. It's the middle of the night. It's pitch black. You're looking for a bear that you don't know much about. And you have in your mind this image of a bear that's just on a rampage.

And you're out there just kind of like searching around in the dark for its victim. And you know that they can defend their victims and stuff. So like, you're worried. This is really scary. And the book talks a lot about just how terrified these men were while they're out looking for Julie. They get to the campsite, they fan out to look for blood, and they find a lot of it. But it's such a chaotic scene that it's pretty difficult to determine whose blood was whose. And then Steve Pierre finds this trail of blood leading down the hill through the glacier lilies.

And he yells for the others to join him. And then he finds a woman's purse and a $1 bill in this trail of blood. And he's racing so fast along this trail now that this ranger, Gary, has to keep telling him to stop and to get behind him because he's the one with the gun. but Steve is just like on the hunt, he's looking for Julie. Suddenly the trail disappears and they have to fan out again. And they're like really worried again because they know they're close at this point. And suddenly they hear a muffled noise cutting through the darkness

and everyone gets completely quiet to listen for the source of the sound. And after they wait a few seconds, they hear the noise again and it's a muffled cry for help. And they all react instantly and they dash through the dark night toward the sound of the voice. So Gary, the Ranger, Tom Walton, the manager of the chalet, and Steve, the native guy, were the first to reach Julie. She's lying on her face in a small ditch, and her body is completely ripped open and torn head to toe. She's totally covered in blood, and they are completely shell-shocked that she's alive with how badly she's ripped up. Dr. Lindan runs to her, he drops down next to her, and as he drops down next to her, he sees her move her lips, and she quietly says, it hurts. They scramble to make another stretcher from some material in the trail cabin, and he looks at her wounds.

And again, I'm going to, I was trying to summarize this, but I'm just going to read directly from the book. And this is pretty gnarly. So just so you know, this is a pretty gnarly description of what was happening to her. Viewer discretion advised. Yeah. She'd taken off her blood-soaked blouse and put it behind her head as a pillow, but she wore cut off blue jeans, and there were puncture holes and long rips in the back of her pant legs. The girl's hair was matted with blood and dirt.

Between the hand and the elbow of her right arm, there appeared to be nothing but bone, and a foam of blood was oozing from holes in both left and right thorax regions. Dr. Lindan recognized these sucking wounds as an immediate threat to her life. One lung was already collapsed, and the punctures made it impossible for her to breathe normally. Her face and neck muscles were contorting and throbbing, as they worked to replace the oxygen that was hissing out of the holes in her chest,

faster than it can be replaced. Quickly, Dr. Lindan placed compresses on the holes and bandaged them as tightly as he could. When he started to turn the girl over gently, she said cold, cold, and Dr. Lindan ripped off his own shirt and covered her. Most of the others removed their jackets and shirts, and soon the wounded girl was lying under a layer of borrowed clothing. The doctor called for more shirts and began tearing them into long strips, and while the crew was still en route for the stretcher, he bandaged the girl's wounds and tried to stanch the flow of blood. by now despite the profusion of coagulated blood all over the scene there was little fluid coming from the gaping holes

it appeared that in the two hours since the attack most of the girl's blood supply had drained into the earth to Dr. Lindan it was a miracle that she had managed to stay alive so long so her arm is completely gone it's chewed to the bone she only has like a bone for an arm and she's got these sucking wounds all over her chest her lungs are trying to suck air from these holes through her chest oh she's in really bad she's Yeah, that's sad.

So Tom Walton, like, sees this and he immediately turns around and starts vomiting. And back in the chalet, Joan and Dr. Lipinski had turned the dining room into a makeshift operating room, and they have all these medical supplies set out now, and there's busy-making preparations when someone yells that this rescue team is returning and that they've got Julie. And on the way up to the chalet, Julie asked Don to hold her hand and softly tells him that she's scared. I'm going to read one more. This is the last selection that I'm going to read, but it talks about them showing up to the chalet.

As soon as Julie Helgeson was transferred from the bed springs to the operating table, the doctor gave her an intermuscular shot for pain and began removing the first aid bandages that completely covered the severe sucking wound of the left thorax. The puncture was about an inch and a half wide. Dr. Lipinski placed his hand across it and realized that there was no way to improvise a perfect seal. Indeed, the surgeon doubted that the problem could have been solved in the operating room of a major hospital.

Too much time had passed. As he hurriedly applied addressing to the wound and tried to cover each pinpoint of air leakage, he saw that the girl's body was calling on the last reserves of respiration. Muscles in the neck and the intercostals between the two ribs were standing out clearly as they tried to assist primary muscles of respiration like the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles. And still there was that terrible suck-suck of the air being lost through the hole. Dr. Lipinski looked at the girl's face. It was almost the only undamaged part of her.

He could see the signs of the terrible fight her body was making. As she fought to get air, her mouth opened and her teeth showed, and the muscles in her cheeks throbbed with effort. So all three men are working on her, like all the doctors, Lipinski, Ladan, and the Air Force medic. And I'm going to read just like a little bit more. I lied when I said that was the last section I'm going to read. Dr. Lipinski, so he says,

for the first several minutes of the emergency procedure, the tall surgeon had allowed himself to believe that the patient had a chance for survival, but as he took inventory of the injuries, he realized that he had been optimistic. In addition to the mangled arm and the punctured thorax, there were gashes and cuts all over the girl's body, perhaps made by the timber and rocks she had been dragged across,

and the injuries to the upper legs turned out to be more than cuts and scrapes. There were whole sections of flesh chewed away. Lipinski ordered his teenage daughter, Terese, to hold the flashlight close, while he began to cut down to try and find a vein in the girl's ankle. But no matter how deeply he probed, he found nothing but chalky white flesh. The loss of blood had been extreme, and now it appeared that the veins were collapsed. The surgeon abandoned the ankle and cut into the wrist,

and after much effort, he succeeded in finding an uncollapsed vein and inserted the needle. The plasma bottle was hung from a rafter high above, and the precious fluid began seeping into the girl's circulatory system. So they're doing everything they can. But around 4 a.m., Father Conley approaches this operating table, and he asked Lipinski if Julie's going to make it. And Lipinski gives him a shake of his head, and he lets the priest know that she's not going to survive.

So Father Connolly sits next to her, and he holds her hand, and he softly tells her that God would watch over her, and he gives her like a conditional baptism and last rites. And she's like mouthing the words as he's saying him. And then she starts breathing really shallow, and then she stops breathing and dies at 4.12 a.m. So that was the death of Julie Helgeson. And it's really heavy.

Yeah. And it really sets in to everyone that's there in the chalet. And they're just sitting there in silence. And the crazy thing is that they have no idea that eight miles away at Trout Lake, the exact same thing is happening. And another girl is being killed by a grizzly bear. and that's what we're going to talk about in episode two. So that's Julie Helgeson. She was the woman who was killed at the Granite Park Shelley Campground.

Pretty wild. Even though this happened, what, like 50 something years ago, 55 years ago, it's still heavy. This is like a hard one to talk about it, even though this is like such an old one. No, this one made me more sad than like any story you've ever told. There's a lot of details. Reading these books was crazy for me because I was like. I was frustrated too that they had like such a big group and they waited to look for. I understand.

They very well could have saved her life. Yeah. I know. And that's the hard thing is like it's not like they found her cold and dead. And like she had been dead for a couple hours and like the force of the attack killed her. She died from bleeding out. Yeah. Like that's why Julie died.

And they probably could have stopped that from happening. Had that first group that came down and found Roy had they just been like, no, we're going to. to go find her, we're going to do whatever we need to get her, there's a good chance she would have survived. Yeah, that's so sad. It is, that's like such an impossible decision. Because if you are in charge, if you're a Joan, you know, or whoever, do you risk someone else's life when, like, you don't even know if she's alive at that point?

Do you take that risk? It's a big risk to take. It is a grizzly at night defending a kill. Like, you don't know what's going to happen. And I actually talked to some of the people I worked with in Yellowstone about that decision. And they mostly agreed. with what Joan decided that like, really without bear spray, without a gun,

without any kind of deterrent, it's too risky. And you just got to protect the people that are, take care of the boy. And once you have help, go look for the girl. So it's tricky. But I agree with you, Jeff.

I would have gone and looked for it. Yeah. I would have, but I know a lot about bears. And these people. I would have been mad that they woke him up still. I would have been the Tom in this story. I mean, like, well, it's not attacking me. He's having a really nice dream.

Yeah. I think I'm a skip ouchies just because I think all three of us are giving us a 10 ouches, right? I feel like you already got our ouchy of the year for when we do our closing awards. Yeah, I mean. Early submission. I'm pretty sure we're all in the 10-Oches category. We don't need to skip it, but we're all 10. We're all 10.

Yeah. Do you guys have any questions about the first episode of our three-parter? Like, it's only going to get worse from here. Uh-uh. Oh, no. Yeah. Honestly, this one shook me, but. The next one shook me even more.

Yeah, sorry. I quit. They're bad. Yeah. I'm going to get a new job. It's funny because I was on the couch this morning and Jesse was kind of watching some of the documentary with me. And we were talking about like the, about Steve, the guy who like, you know, was like smart about bears and got the fire and like found Julie and all this stuff. And I like was talking to her about him and I got a hitch in my throat because I found myself like getting emotional.

And I was like, well, I'm too close to this one. I need to take a step back. So I don't know. It was a hard one. And the great thing is now we have the information and we have the tools to be a lot safer. And we're going to talk about that in one of our categories. So are we ready to get into them? Yeah, let's do it.

Okay. Let's first then, you know what? Just since we're kind of talking about it, let's do what would Mike and Jeff do? So you guys are sleeping out under the stars and you wake up to a grizzly bear attacking. you or your friend. What are you doing? I'm going to just go hide in my sleeping bag. You can't see it. Do the monster.

You know? The old monster approach. Yeah. Hide under the blanket. Remember that one for our next episode. Just put it in a nap. We'll drop that down all quick. That's in the polar bear one, too.

Yeah. With two people, are two people enough to be any kind of intimidating threat to a bear? Like if you kind of stood shoulder to shoulder, started making a lot of noise and got really big. Is that, is that going to deter a bear that's already going pretty wild? It definitely could. It definitely could. The more people you have, the less chance you have of being attacked. The real breaking point seems to be from two to three.

Once you have three people, it's like almost unheard of. But having two is a lot more effective than having one. Maybe like both of you circle it on opposite ends and the guy behind it can like, yank its tail and then he'll turn around and then the other person yinks its tail give it like a wet have you ever seen a grizzly bear tail wouldn't be too easy to yank its tail uh mike what's your answer i mean that was kind of it like yank it's tail i just tried to i just try to be really loud and start shouting yeah i don't know that's honestly we've talked we've talked about a number of grisley's already i think this is like our fourth or we still have to redo our first episode that has grizzlies

which we're going to do. But this should be considered a campsite attack. The bear is probably looking for food. It wasn't startled by these people. It wasn't surprised. This isn't a territorial bear that's reacting to a threat. This is a bear that's looking for food. And if you have a bear attacking you in the middle of the night in your campsite,

it's probably trying to eat you. So playing dead isn't the right move. The reason it worked for Roy is because the bear was biting him and then thought, okay he's dead so I'm gonna go kill this other one because this one's done and then the second roy started making you know sitting up or whatever the bear went back and bit him a little bit more and then once he stopped moving it went back to the girl it's just trying it only works if it's attacking someone else yeah so if you play dead you can play more dead for a little bit yeah but it's gonna eat you sooner or later it's not gonna make the bear go away so playing dead isn't

the right move the right move is really what mike said is you got to fight back and you You've got to convince that you're not an easy meal, and you've got to do anything you can to get it away from the area. So if you have bear spray, you should definitely use your bear spray. If you don't, you're throwing things at it, you're yelling at it, you're screaming, you're putting up the biggest fight possible. You're treating it like you would treat an attacking black bear because when a black bear attacks you, it's predatory.

If a grizzly is attacking you in your campsite, you need to get it out of there. This would be a case like if you didn't have bear spray or any kind of deterrent, I would probably try and get up a tree. It would be a last-ditch thing, but it would be a case where it's just like, you got no better option. Can't you just stand behind the tree? And then if it...

It wouldn't really work. And then just run in circles around it, if the bear tries to go around it. It might buy you a couple seconds, but it's going to get you. Maybe if it's like a sequoia. Like they're much more agile and... Yeah, maybe.

Yeah. Anyway, there's not, like, without a deterrent, there's not a great answer for this one. You need a deterrent. you need to be able to stop the bear. Right. So, Mike, you were pretty close, actually. Maybe just fight it off with everything you've got.

Just like, don't choose the campsite right by where they're feeding bears too. Yeah, exactly. Another idea is to have like a plate of food next to you while you're sleeping. So the bear is like, oh, well, there's food right there. I won't have to eat these humans. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. I mean, it's not.

But like the plate is on a big trap that like a mouse trap. There you go. There's a little noose that goes around its leg and then it hangs it up in the air. Right. So, like, you bring up the other good point, though, not that. The other thing. Not camping near somewhere where someone's feeding bears. Don't feed bears.

When a bear is food conditioned, it learns to associate people with food. It loses that natural fear of people. It starts taking risks that it wouldn't normally take. And we're going to learn which bear was probably responsible for this. But like, hint, hint, you know, it's that female with cubs. Yeah, we got that. And typically a female with cubs doesn't want anything to do with a potential threat. But in this case, it did.

And it was because it was used to taking risks around people. That's like a really risky situation. Avoid food condition bears and avoid leading to bears becoming food condition. Okay, so that's kind of what you should do if you're attacked in your campsite by a grizzly bear. Okay, so we're going to move on because we're going to be able to talk more about that, unfortunately, in the next episode, too. Our next category is our favorite pop culture grizzly bear. Jeff, you want to go first? Yeah, so we've done this once before, but that episode's now gone because we've had a few airs.

That was our first episode ever. It'll be back. I'm sticking with Paddington. Paddington is just... Not a grizzly bear. Did you say grizzly bear? Yeah, grizzly bear. Okay. Well, what type of bear is Paddington?

He'd be like an Andean bear or a spectacle bear. Are we going to do an episode on that? No, probably not. I'm sticking with Paddington. You can pick Paddington if you want. He's a cute bear. He wears like a coat that I like a lot. And then gets in like a ton of trouble, but somehow he never squishes the marmalade sandwich in his hat. So that's really impressive to me.

And really changed the prison life. I like Paddington. Okay. I'll pick Bart the bear, who I think is who I picked in our first episode, too, but he's the bear from, like, The Edge and Legends of the Fall. Oh, that Hollywood one. Yeah. Actor bear.

Yeah. So I'm going to pick him. He's a big shot. I'm going with Lumpjaw. He's the grizzly bear in the animated short bongo. And I saw it at our... So first of all, my dad showed it to us, and he prefaced it by saying, this bear really scared me when I was little.

And then he, like, turned around and showed it to me when I was... I was like three years old and, uh, just to like pass on that. Thus scared me as well. And I'll scare my children at the same old bear. So, uh, yeah, lump job. Wes, do you have a favorite Bart performance? Yeah, Legends of the Fall. Okay.

Actually, you know, probably the edge where he like it, yeah, I think I like him the best in the edge. He's a much bigger character in that. Cool. Yeah, he probably prepared for the role a little more seriously. Yeah, he got a real method. Yeah. Yeah.

I, I, I want to. see him play something other than a bear. I would have liked to see him branched out a little bit. Yeah, he was typecast. Like a drug abuser, like get into like a real meat. Or just like play like a tiger or something. Yeah. All right.

So our next category is listener questions. Jeff, you got a couple listener questions for us? Yeah, I'm just going to do two because we have a long episode. But I got two pretty good ones here. So from Reg, uh, they want to know. favorite place to poop? Mine is this weird little outhouse on the Pacific coast in Baja. I know that when you're talking about.

It's just like wooden and has no door and just looks out onto the ocean. And it's definitely my favorite place to poop. Yeah, that brings up, there's another one in El Ojo Negro, where we go to see gray whales. Oh, yeah. And you can like see the whales out in the ocean while you're pooping. It's just this huge window where it's. on like a double-decker outhouse. I'll go with that.

Yeah. Double-decker. Ooh, that's cool. Mike? My favorite place I ever went was this, it was like this bathroom that was tucked all the way down at the end of this terminal at the airport in Bangkok. And it was like pristine. It was right after the whole SARS scare.

You remember the SARS thing back in the early 2000s? So like they're taking very seriously like public health measures back in the day, like in that specific part of the world. So like this place was sparkling clean. And it had probably like my first and best experience with a bidet. Okay. So that was pretty important to me. I can't believe we all chose public toilets.

Um, all right. And then from fragrant, clay, can marine animals contract rabies? I don't think so. Yeah. I don't think so. Okay. Well, that's it for listening to questions.

All right. So our next category is how are we messing things up for them? I wanted to specifically talk about Glacier Grizzly Bears. So as I mentioned, there's around 300 bears in the park these days. They're actually doing pretty well. They've rebounded from decades of persecution and all sorts of hunting and predator control and, you know, lots of different things. I will say that Montana is pushing pretty hard to take grizzly bears off the endangered species list and to start hunting them again. That population where glacier is, the northern continental divide,

those bears have rebounded and they are past the target of what the state had sent to put them off of the list. But I am a little worried about the current government and like how aggressive they would be about hunting them. So I don't know if that's the right call or not. But essentially currently we're not messing things up for them, but pretty soon we might be. Yeah, I don't like it either. I don't think we should be hunting bears. But that's something that might happen soon. And when it does, we'll definitely talk more about it.

But for the sake of time, I'm not going to get too deep into it. But Grizzlies are doing pretty well in Montana. They're definitely rebounded from where they were in, like, the 50s and 60s. Do you think, like, grizzly bears appreciate how beautiful of places they choose to live? I'd like to think they do. Like, they're just like, man, it's hard to say. This place sure is pretty. I'm glad we moved out of those prairies when all the humans came through.

They might. Who knows? I would hope so. Let's say they do. Okay. Our last category is how much do we like this animal? Let's give it our claws. You guys know this one for me.

It's my favorite animal. It gets 10 claws. You changed it for a little bit. You's had black bears. Yeah, it's back. This is it. This is my number one. This is my number one too.

And it is 10 claws, and I just love seeing them. If you guys want to send me pictures of them, go for it. I'll be happy every time you send me a picture of a grizzly bear. Do you think the fact that grizzly bears smell worse than black bears makes you like them more or less? Less. That probably makes me like them less, but I still really like them. That's, yeah, that's a big thing to overcome, it sounds like. I've never smelled one. It's not really bad. Mike?

Yeah, I'll give them nine. I think they're awesome. They're, yeah, way cooler in black bears. Are they your favorite bear, Mike? Probably not. I think pandas still are. Panda. Yeah, that's a good bear. I like pandas and polars, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You like the pea bears. Oh, yeah, the peas. You guys want to know something I think is really funny that's completely off topic. Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to know. Blink 182 once had a tour called the P-P-P-Poooo Tour. Oh, yeah. I think, didn't they, like, I think they officially founded their business on the name of like that.

That was like, yeah, PLC. Yeah, that's right. Because, like, they would have to have all their lawyers. They would have to refer to them as that. Right. Or something like that, yeah. It's so funny. Should we change our name?

All right. They probably have it licensed, actually. Yeah. We'll just do it backwards. Not in Utah or wherever our LLC is. Well, all right, we probably need to end this thing. Thanks so much for sticking with us. This is going to be a long story.

We've got two more episodes. Real roller coaster of emotions, I bet, for our listeners. Yeah, buckle up because the next one's just as bad if not worse. Oh, come on. We're ready. All right. Thanks, thanks guys and thanks listeners. And again, remember, if you can't get enough,

Get on our Patreon because we got bonus episodes. We got all sorts of extra stuff for you there. And go vote if you haven't voted. Yeah, always good advice. All right. Thanks, Jeff. Yeah. If there's anything to vote for, I don't know.

I love you guys. Bye, everyone. Bye.