October 3, 2023 • 48 mins
Grizzly bears had never killed a person in Glacier National Park until the night of August 12, 1967. That's when everything changed for National Parks moving forward.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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They ship out on October twentieth. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's here too, and this
is Stuff you Should Know. Let's go. How do you
like that one?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I did? I'd also like his title that Livia gave
this one. Yes, it's very fun. Can I read it?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (01:15):
The Night that Transformed Bear human relations.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It's pretty straightforward and says everything you need to say.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah, it's actually sadly very accurate.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah. And yet despite it being that straightforward, there's a
pretty interesting story hidden amid those letters.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Sounds like a crossword clue it does.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I feel like we should tell that story now or else? Really?
What are we doing here? Chuck?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
All right, well, I think this is one of those
Unfortunately we can't just sort of play out as a
teaser to reveal what happens. I think we kind of
need to say what actually happened and then tell that story. Yeah,
all right, did you want to tease this thing out?
Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, and justult.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Because what we're talking about is a very sad night
August of nineteen sixty seven when two young women, two
nineteen year old women were killed by two and here's
the kicker, two different bears in two different places in
the same National park. If it was one bear that
(02:22):
just went crazy or something and they were all camping together,
that would be obviously tragic, but not like, Hey, we
need to really look at what's going on here. And
that's what happened, because it was two bears in two places.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, And the reason why it was such a kicker
is because in the fifty seven years leading up to
that that Glacier National Park was a national park, only
three other people had ever been killed by grizzly bears.
And then all of a sudden, it went from three
people in fifty seven years to two women in two
separate incidents in one night. That is crazy, and it
(02:54):
really did kick off this a national conversation about should
grizzly bears stay alive as a species because we like
living in national parks? Do we have the right to
do that kind of thing. It's a pretty interesting story.
It's got a lot of facets to it. And I
feel like we should talk a little bit about grizzly
bears first, because I didn't realize that they were just
(03:16):
a subspecies of brown bear, although that makes a lot
of sense.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, grizzlies are brown bears. They are generally darker than
brown bears in coloring. They're generally smaller. They can be
you know, a couple hundred pounds up to about six hundred,
but they And it's interesting here because I think it
depends on where you live and here you ask. Like,
usually brown bears are called brown bears. When they're more coastal,
(03:43):
like the ones you see like grabbing that salmon out
of the river, you would call a brown bear. I
thought that was a grizzly, whereas if you live inland
and you're a bear, a brown bear, you're called a grizzly.
But then I also saw people talking about coastal grizzlies,
so it may be one of those names is just
sort of been tacked onto a lot of kind of
brown bears.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, I think it's just, you know, it's confusing.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, but they're brown bears.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, they're brown bears, which makes them, you know, and
they're relatively small brown bear. There's a type of brown
bear called a kodiak that gets up to ten feet
tall when it's standing on its hind legs.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
No, thank you.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Grizzlies are not nearly that big, but they're still big enough.
I mean, the males can get up to about six
hundred pounds, and there used to be a lot more
of them than there are today. The early nineteenth century,
I think, I think around the time of Lewis and
Clark there was an estimated fifty thousand to one hundred
thousand grizzly bears. They went all the way from Canada
(04:42):
down to Mexico. They were in every what's now states
along the West, all the way over to the Great Plains.
There was a ton of them. And then as we
started to move out there, we meaning white American settlers
and colonists. Part of what that whole West were expansion
included was not just wiping out Native Americans, it was
(05:04):
also wiping out large carnivores too.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, like when they talk about taming the West, that's
what they mean. It's like, let's go out there and
kill things. And they did this for a few reasons.
Sometimes it was because they had cattle that they wanted
to take care of, or you know, occasionally if they
thought they were in harm's way, they might kill a bear.
But a lot of it was just that sort of
(05:28):
I was about to say human nature, but really man's nature,
at least some men, not me or you, to want
to kill big, beautiful animals because they're big and beautiful,
and you know, I guess could be considered dangerous.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, you got to keep an eye on those people
because they can very quickly become real like most dangerous
game types.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So by the time nineteen sixty seven rules around, when
the two nineteen year old women who died lost their lives,
and I'll just go ahead and say their names are
Julie Helgeson Man and Michelle Coon's. By the time they
died in August of nineteen sixty seven, grizzly bears had
been wiped out so thoroughly that they had a territory
(06:13):
that was about two percent of what it had once been.
Mostly they were in national parks because those were protected areas,
and there was something like under a thousand of them
in the entire continental United States.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, that's two percent is great when you're talking milk.
It's not great when you're talking about animal populations.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Did you write that one down?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I didn't. It just gained.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
I mean it still present.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Here's the weird thing, though, is, and it seems rather counterintuitive,
there were there were more even though there were fewer bears,
there were more human encounters with these bears for this
very reason. And as we'll see, this is what part
of what led to this huge mess. And it's really
hard to if you're our age and maybe obviously younger.
(06:59):
You don't realize that National parks weren't always these places
where they really were smart about everything they did right,
because at the time, they would do some crazy things
in national parks. They would try and get bears around,
they would leave food out, they would There was one
story here that Livia found where and luckily a park
(07:21):
ranger kind of stopped this in the act. But these
parents brought a bear over with some food with a
candy bar and then tried to put their eighteen month
old on this bear's back to take a picture.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah, there's a story in that same article about a
guy who was trying to lure a bear into his
car to get a photo of it behind the wheel. Yeah,
just people interacting with giants. Again, six hundred pound grizzly bears.
They can just take your head clean off if they
want to. But that's the thing. They are really unpredictable,
and for the most part, they're vegetarians. I think plants
(07:53):
make up something like ninety percent of their diets, and
a lot of times they're I don't want to say docile.
But the eight month old baby survived, and so did
the mom. And so did the dad. If that bear
had acted any differently, they wouldn't have survived. So I
saw that their personalities can best be summed up as unpredictable.
But at the time in the sixties, that is not
(08:14):
the impression people had of bears. They were kind of
considered a lot more gentle. There was a park ranger
who was quoted by Jack Olsen who will meet in
a little while, who said that on a scale of
a danger scale, where a butterfly is a zero and
a rattlesnak is a ten, the grizzlies of Glacier Park
would have to rate somewhere between zero and one. That
(08:37):
is entirely wrong. He really should have said they rate
between a zero and a ten. And you have no
idea which what it's going to be at any given moment.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
If you encounter a bear, yeah, and you know, like
a lot of large animals like this, when there is
a you know, their accident. So I'm gonna call it
an accidental killing. Because bears weren't like, ooh, human, let
me eat them, like you said. They're mostly vegetarian, and
even when they ate stuff that was non vegetarian, it
wasn't like oh boy, let me go chow down on
(09:07):
that person. It was let me go chow down on
that person's steak by the fire or the fish that
they're cooking, or something like that. And so when there
is an accident, it's usually one of a couple of things.
It's either the sort of familiar scenario where you stumble
upon a bear and scare them, or they may have
their cubs around them. I be a mama with some cubs,
or it is that bear that's like, wait a minute,
(09:30):
that's my food. You're eating that fish out of that river.
I want it, so let's go. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Apparently they defend their food like it's like with the
most jealous violence that they need to like, that is
their food, even if it's your food.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, exactly, because that bear thinks it's their food because
it's their territory. And the other thing that Livia was
keen to point out, which is like it sounds sort
of funny at first, but it really is a thing
that you need to pay attention to, is the Yoga
Bear cartoon was a big thing, and Yogi and Booboo
as these sort of friendly bears going after the picanic
(10:08):
basket that came about, because that's what it was like.
It wasn't like someone said, I got this crazy idea,
let's take these ferocious animals and make them a hand
of Barbara and let's make them into a lovable cartoon character.
It was like, No, that's when you went to these
national parks. Like you said, people are luring bears around.
They're like, ooh, take my picanic basket. If I can
(10:30):
take a picture, pick a picture, pick a picture. Yeah,
going to make that into a cla picnic thing. Anyway,
That's how things were. So that's why they made that cartoon,
and that was just sort of what was going on.
Like they literally at Glacier at one Oh I'm sorry,
this is at Yellowstone, but they were doing similar things
in Glacier. At Yellowstone they put bleachers up around the
(10:54):
open air dumps so people could show up and watch
the bear show, which was bears wandering in to eat.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah. So a lot of people rightfully lay a lot
of the blame for the deaths in nineteen sixty seven
at the feet of the administrators of national parks at
the time, because they were using the bears as entertainment
and at the very least even if they weren't in
some of the parks, they were not instructing the public
on how to interact with bears and just how dangerous
(11:20):
bears were. And that was a huge problem because, like
you said, people were treating them like they were just
these docile, gentle animals that wouldn't do them any harm.
And then the other factor that kind of gets overlooked
is that this is right after the national highway system
had really been developed and people were hitting the road.
So these national parks were suddenly just swamped with tourists
(11:41):
for the first time in their history. So people were
there were far fewer bears, but there were a lot
more people all up in the bear's grills than there
ever had been in human history.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, and leading up to this specific incident, and we'll know,
we'll detail a little bit more of this after I
guess we'll take a break here in a couple of minutes.
But at Glacier there were sort of in the days
leading up, there were a lot of alarming incidences where
bears were becoming way more aggressive or if you're watching
a cartoon, way more friendly than they had been. There
(12:13):
were fires that came through the park in the summer
of sixty seven, so that shrank their habitat some and
kind of squeezed them into a smaller area. And there
was one bear in particular that had been reported a
few different times. I went back, I'm sure you did too,
and read this great original Sports Illustrated article. Who was
it that wrote that?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Jack Olson?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, jack Olson is kind of the standard account of
this horrific event. But this bear was an emaciated female
who is underweight. Had been reported a lot going up
to people being very brazen and you not like typically
when you see a bear, if you ever watch these
outdoor shows, you start yelling at the bear, like get
(12:55):
out of here, and clanking a pot and the bear
usually he's gonna leave. Bears are scared and they don't want
to be around people. But this bear was not taking
any orders and not doing any of the things that
a bear would usually do. It would just come into
a camp and start eating and not leave until they
wanted to leave. This skinny lady bear right.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So we have in the Western National Park System a
situation where bears have become acclimated to humans. They're totally
fine with being really close to humans, kind of not
scared of us. And then also they had become habituated
on human food and garbage, and they now associated humans
(13:35):
with food and they were no longer scared of humans.
There were a huge population of bears in the western
parks with lots of humans coming to see them.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
All right, well, that sounds like a very natural place
to stop, thanks and never come back, but we do.
We have to tell this bad story, so we'll be
back right after this, all right, So we're going to
(14:22):
take this one horrible incident at a time, and we're
going to start with the story of you mentioned earlier,
Julie Helguson. Man, that is really hard. For some reason,
it is I want to say a different word, but
it's Julie Helgason. She was from Minnesota, and she was
nineteen years old. Along with her friend that we're going
(14:45):
to meet who also lost her life, Michelle Coons. They
were both working summer jobs at Glacier. I imagine in the
late sixties at Glacier it was probably pretty great. I mean,
Glacier is an amazing place even today, but back then,
I imagine it was a pretty awesome summer job to have.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, So I think Julie was working in the laundry
facility and Michelle was working in a gift shop. And
that makes the whole thing even more bizarre to me
because they knew each other. They both set out on
separate hikes on the afternoon of Saturday, August twelfth, nineteen
sixty seven, and they knew each other well enough that
Julie and her crew invited Michelle or no vice versa.
(15:24):
Michelle and her crew of five other friends and a
dog named Squirt invited Julie and her friend I'm getting
boyfriend vibes, Roy duke It to join them. But Michelle
and her group were going somewhere. I think they were
going to Trout Lake, and Julie and Roy had been
(15:46):
to Trout Lake the weekend before, so they wanted to
go in a different hike to Granite Park. She La
and they all set out, and these were experienced hikers.
They knew what they were doing, and they were off
to have a good weekend overnight camping trip out in
the woods. In the back country is what they call it,
but the back country is another word for wild territory.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
That's right, I imagine they you know, we say they
knew each other imagine it was a pretty tight knit
group back then. There are many many more employees now
at these national parks and there were back then, and
you know these they were the same age, and they
were teens working this like amazing summer job. So we're
talking about Helgeson and du Kat at this point, they
(16:26):
hitchhiked to the and if you've ever driven down this road,
it's amazing. It's called going to the Sun road. The
main roadways it is, but it's really great. Well it's
really not because you don't actually go to the sun
it we'd be going toward the Sun road would be
what it should be called. But they went to spend
the night at this chalet initially, but the chalet was full,
(16:48):
and so back in the days where when you could
be surprised by something like that, and when they got there,
they they saw it was full and they said, all right,
well we'll just go camp about five hundred yards away.
We'll go camp in the woods sort of the immediate backcountry,
and they ate dinner, they watched the sunset off that road,
and they take it. They didn't have tents because they
(17:08):
thought they were going to be the chalet. No, so
they just bedded down in their sleeping bags on the
ground outside.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I've seen sleeping bag. Oh, that's why I took it
to possibly be her boyfriend.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
But you could have zipped them together. That'll move.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
There's one thing that yeah, I guess so I forgot
you could do that. There's one thing we should say
about the chalet Granite Park chalet that they hiked to
and were camping near. That was the site of a
purposeful feeding area that the managers of the chalet were
throwing out food scraps to attract the bears for the
(17:42):
entertainment of their guests. And just four days before this,
some rangers had visited Granite Park chalet saw what they
were doing and we're like, you can't do that, stop
doing that, And the manager were like, sure, sure, we'll
definitely stop doing that. So these guys are open air
camping about five football fields away from that very shellet.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
That's right. So after they're in their bags at night,
just after midnight, a bear arrived, grizzly bear to their
camping spot. And you know, some of this stuff has
come out later in different forms, whether it was interviews
with survivors after the fact, or that sports Illustrated story
or them writing about it years later, and they've tried
(18:23):
to piece it together as best they can. But I
did see some of the details kind of varied here
and there among the accounts. But what we do know
is that Ducott said later on that Julie had seen
the bear and woke him up and said, hey, there's
a bear here. And from what I read in Sports Illustrated,
it was about ten feet away, but it was definitely
a bear, and so she's like played dead. The bear
(18:45):
did not fall for that and began mauling Ducott got
to his arms, his legs and his back and then
left him alone and then dragged poor Julie Helgeson off.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, and so Ducott and there were other people camping nearby,
and you know, the chalet was five football fields away,
but there was probably help there. So they were screaming there,
using their flashlights to flash sos and they managed to
get the attention of some people who called for a helicopter,
and they came and got Ducat and he said, well,
don't forget Julie. She's out there somewhere. Apparently a ranger
(19:21):
who would have been in charge of sending out the
search party waited about two hours before he finally said, okay,
let's go out and find her because he was concerned
about putting other people's lives in danger, additional lives and
danger searching for her because we might run into that
bear and that I don't know if that caused her death.
(19:42):
I mean, the bear caused her death, but that might
have helped seal her fate. Two hours, Yeah, that was
two hours they finally found her. This happened just after midnight. Remember.
They finally found her and got her to the chalet
at three forty five am, and she died at four
to twelve am. She we had puncture wounds to her
throat and lungs, but she probably had died largely of
(20:05):
blood loss and it entered shock and that was it.
So I don't you can't really say, yes, she definitely
would have survived, but perhaps her chances of survival would
have been higher had they gone out and searched for
and founder a couple hours earlier.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, I think for sure. My initial reaction was to be,
you know, like, what the heck with this ranger? But again,
this is nineteen sixty seven, it was a different time.
They didn't have the resources they do now they didn't.
I'm sure now if there's any kind of bear situation,
they A they know exactly what to do and exactly
how to handle it, and B they have I would
(20:43):
imagine they have all kinds of tranquilizers or just more
guns and stuff to deal with this kind of thing
that they didn't have back then. I mean, it sounded
like if they would have gone after this bear, it
might have been one park ranger who maybe had a pistol,
maybe didn't, and then a bunch of other people with
you know, baseball bats or something like. They weren't prepared.
(21:03):
So I tried not to judge too harshly that this
guy said, hey, let's wait, because they had never encountered
something like this before.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
And I think rightfully so, like people don't usually make
decisions out of cowardice. It's normally there's some other line
of thinking that in hindsight proved to be a bad decision.
So that was the unfortunate death of Julie Helgeson. She
was very terribly mauled and died of blood loss and
(21:31):
wounds to her lungs and throat. Michelle Coons just hours later,
essentially around the same time that Julie Helguson was dying
in a makeshift operating room at the chalet, a bear
was wandering up to Michelle and her her group's sleeping
(21:53):
bags that they had set up around a campfire and
a beach, because that same bear had already visited them
all the way back at eight pm and caused them
to split.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah, that bear came up. This bear came back
a few times. It was it was a very kind
of one of those things. Again, in hindsight, you're like,
they should have gotten out of there, but you know
what kind of detail, all the reasons why they had
gone fishing. They set up by this great lake, not
capital great lake, but this amazing lake. No, right, they
(22:26):
went fishing. They're one of the guys that was with
them was just sixteen years old, like these were kids,
you know. And he caught one fish. He caught a
rainbow trout, augmented that meal with some hot dogs, grilled
it up, and that grizzly, like you said, at eight pm,
came wandering around and they took off. They watched this
bear from a short distance eat that food and then
(22:49):
grab one of their backpacks and take it away. And
this is a point where like they could have gotten
the heck out of there, but they were like, it's
getting dark, we don't know what to do. This bear left.
It got our food, so it's probably fine now, right.
And also, if we're going to get out of here,
we got to go through this berry bush field that
are you know, that's tall berries or bears love those berries,
(23:10):
so they're you know, that bear may be there, there
may be may be more bears. So let's go down
here to the beach area. Let's build a huge fire
to try and help keep the bear away. And they
built a log barricade between that fire and their old
campsites and then line their sleeping bags up around this campfire.
But very key here they did bring some food. They
(23:32):
brought some cookies and some cheese its so to that
new campsite.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
So is that the idea that that that was what
attracted the bear back again? The food, Yeah, the cheese its.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
I mean it was food and thereafter food.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So okay, we should also say one other thing. As
they were before they even reached Trout Lake in the afternoon,
when they were on their hike to it, they passed
some other hikers who said that they had been recently
chased up a tree by a grizzly around that bear
nuts to that we're gonna keep going, and that that
same bear they believe. Also, it turned out actually they
(24:08):
not even they didn't believe it, like it was that
same troublesome bear that had been chasing girl scouts around
and had had been a problem all summer because it
was underfed and emaciated. And apparently that's a really good
way for a bear to start acting and behaving very
oddly and aggressively, is when it's underfed.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
That's right. So this same bear that has been overly
aggressive toward everybody it meets, it seems like, came back
again after the eight o'clock visit, came back at three
am in the middle of the night. One of them
wakes up, sees that that fire is has basically died out,
and he jumped up things. The guy who caught the
trout jumped up to go start rebuilding this fire again
(24:52):
really quickly, and apparently set those cookies down on that
log barrier that they had between it and the old
camp site. So now it's three am. They all decide
the bear takes these cookies and goes away, and they
all decide, listen, we're gonna stay awake for the rest
of the night because now we're out here in the
(25:13):
middle of the night, we're genuinely stuck, like we can't
just hike off in the darkness, and so they decide
to all stay awake together.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So, man, I would have been quite scared by this time.
This is the second time the bear visited, right.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, eight o'clock PM, three am, constantly just taking this food.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And then now we get back to four thirty am
when the bear returns a final time, and this time
it just goes straight up aggressive. I don't know if
it was because they ran out of food and the
bear didn't like the fact that they didn't have any
more food or what, but it bit one of the
guys sleeping bags. It clowted his sweatshirt. So now we
get back to four thirty am when that bear returns
(25:53):
a final time, and I don't know if it was
because they had run out of food and the bear
didn't like that very much, but it became more aggressive
than the other times, and it actually started attacking the
kids in this camping group. One of them had its
sleeping bag bitten, which if a bear's attacking you and
it bites your sleeping bag, that's kind of best case scenario.
(26:14):
Clawed his sweatshirt, and I think there was other bear
encounters in this event.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Right, Yeah, so that was Paul Donne. He starts screaming,
He runs away and climbs a tree. This bear is
chasing him. He runs away and he climbs a tree.
This kid's sixteen, So he's up this tree in a
matter of seconds. Apparently he did get all cut up
in stuff though, because he didn't have a shirt on
and he was, you know, climbing like a person scared
of a bear. Sure, so he gets up in this tree,
(26:41):
and from up in this tree, he looks down and
this bear is sort of circling below him. His friends
are at the camp. They have obviously woken up at
this point, and they see the bear circling the tree,
so that they use that as their opportunity to get away.
They grab that dog first of all, Squirt, And yeah,
they grab Squirt when this thing first started happening. They
(27:03):
grabbed it and put it inside the sleeping bag and
literally like had their hand over this dog's poor dog's
mouth like to try and play dead. But so they
finally get away as well. They run away while this
bear is circling the tree below Paul Dunn and except
for one person, and that was Michelle Coons. She they
hear there, literally, you know, thirty forty feet away from
(27:28):
this bear and their friend, and they hear her screaming.
They're like, you know, get out of there, get out
of there. They hear her yell, I can't he's got
the zipper. They hear her yell, he's ripping my arm.
He's got my arm. My arm is gone. And then
they finally hear her yell, oh my god, I'm dead,
and this bear carries her off in the sleeping bag,
(27:50):
still right right in front of them.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, so they are. They have no trouble staying awake
for the rest of the night. At this point. They
couple hours later, the sun came up, and after it
did and they saw that the bear was gone, they
took off for help. Right.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, that was a you know, in these parks, I'm
sure they still have stuff like this, said what's called
seasonal rangers that were maybe just there for the summer.
And there was a guy named Bert Gildart, and he
said at six thirty in the morning, he was at
West Glacier at this point in his little apartment, he
got a knock from another ranger named Norm Hagen, and
(28:29):
Guildhart was the one who knew about that previous killing
earlier in the night. And I'm not sure how, but
somehow he managed to go back to sleep, and he's
the one that got the emergency responders there. Hagen shows
up and says that there's a young woman who is
mauled at Trout Lake. And he was like, no, no, no,
you're confused. This was over at the chalet. And then
(28:49):
as you know, this Hagen guy keeps going, it dawns
on him, like, my god, what has happened. This has
happened twice in a matter of hours.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, So he very quickly out of himself over to
Trout Lake. I read that he essentially ran four miles
from the trailhead to the lake and there was another
ranger already there named Leonard Landa and two other men
arrived by helicopter and they formed a little search party,
and very quickly Leonard Landa discovered Michelle Kuhon's body. And
(29:22):
you had said earlier that like grizzly bears just generally
don't see humans as prey or as food, and one
of the things that makes them so unpredictable is they'll
do that sometimes sometimes they do see us as prey
and food. Like sometimes they'll attack one person in a
party see them as food, and then attack the other
people that defend that first person that they see as food.
(29:45):
And that seemed to be the case also with Michelle Coons,
because when her body was discovered, the bear had begun
eating it. And another dead giveaway usually is that the
bear will eat some and then go essentially bury the
body under some like dirt and twigs and stuff like that,
and then sit around and protect it. And I don't
(30:06):
know if I don't think they found the bear around
her body. They just found her body, but yeah, but
she had been essentially partially eaten.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Man, all right, I feel like we should take another break.
That is the sad story of what happened that night,
and we're going to talk a little bit about the
aftermath of what happened right after this.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Okay, So that was a big deal, not just in Glacier.
That stuff made it out very quickly and one of
the first responses among park officials was to go find
these bears that did this, and not only that, we
might have a problem with any bear that eats human food.
So Gilder and Landa formed like basically a death squad
(31:13):
looking for bears, especially the one who killed Michelle Kuons,
and they were basically instructed to shoot any bear that
didn't run away from him. And the first day they
didn't find any bears. They stayed overnight at a patrol
cabin at a place called Arrow Lake, and when Gildert
went out to use the bathroom the next morning, he
(31:33):
saw a bear and he called for Landa to bring
out the rifles, and Landa did, and as they were
standing there, giving the bear chance right, because none of
these people wanted to kill bears, there wasn't like vengeance necessarily,
and even if there was, I think actually that's not true.
I think Gildert had a sense of vengeance and then
eventually kind of had a change of heart. But some
(31:54):
of the other rangers were not happy about this job
of killing bears. And even if they, however they felt
about it, you were supposed to still kind of give
the bear a chance. If the bear took a step
towards you, that was a dead bear. If it ran
away from you, that bear could live to you know,
be examined. Another day, this bear started coming toward them,
(32:16):
so they had to kill it.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
That's right. And this was the bear. The bear was
seventeen years old. The bear was under three hundred pounds.
And I know we said their range can be a
couple of hundred and up, but I get the idea
that this was a larger bear that was under three
hundred pounds and like clearly underfed and emaciated. They opened
(32:38):
this bear's stomach jaws movie style and found some a
big ball of blonde hair undigested inside the bear, and
also found this which and this is is all. It's
a tragedy for these humans. It's a tragedy for these
bears because they had been you know, fed human trash
for so long, and we're used to people. It's not
(33:00):
their fault. But they found glass embedded in the molars
of this bear. So this bear had been eating glass
food that was probably in glass from trash and made
it difficult for this bear to eat. Probably probably made
the bear very uncomfortable and grumpy, and that probably all
contributed to what happened to Michelle Kuhon's.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, I think it's really important to remember that none
of this was the bear's fault. The bears were acting
like bears, and they were being essentially mistreated by humans
in the park administrators by allowing them to get habituated
human food, because it was destined. This was destined to
happen essentially the way that people were behaving in the parks.
(33:45):
So they had definitively the bear that killed Michelle Kuhon's.
I mean, they didn't test the hair or anything like that,
but it was just her. Yeah, they were still looking
for Julie Helgeson's bear, and they actually never offinitively identified it.
But another ranger named Dave Shay, who was among a
(34:05):
group of four who shot a bear and her cubs
that were feeding at the Chalet garbage pit, he was
convinced that that was the one that killed Helgeson because
that bear had blood on her claws, and I don't
believe Julie Helguson had any feeding done to her, So
it's not like that could have been an innocent bear
that just came along and was like, oh, I'm going
to have a bite of this but didn't kill her.
(34:27):
It was almost certainly the bear that killed her. And
even if it wasn't, there an orgy of grizzly bear
death fell over Glacier and Yellowstone and the other national
parks that had grizzly bears in the ensuing weeks, months
and years after the Night of the Grizzlies.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Absolutely, like you said, the media got hold of this
and all of of course, all of a sudden, everyone
once got an opinion. Everyone thinks that they know exactly
why this happened. Some people were like, well, there were
thunderstorms and lightning nearby that could have agitated them. The
idea that bears are attracted to minstrual blood was brought up.
(35:07):
I think they now say that that's maybe true with
polar bears.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Only well, they've never experimented with They experimented with polar bears.
Polar bears showed a preference for that and like seal
blood or something, and then they've never experimented like that
with grizzlies. But somebody that did like a once over
of grizzly attacks and didn't find any pattern necessary. So
we don't know experimentally, but we do know anecdotally that's
probably not true.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Right, But at any rate, that doesn't keep the media
from reporting something like this, sure, and then showing up
in Anchorman as a joke years later. But you know,
it was coincidence. There was never any like link between
these two. It was just a really bad coincidence, a
horrific example of bad human luck that night between these
(35:53):
two young women. Jack Olson wrote that story, the Sports
Illustrated Story, which is a really fun read parts and
three separate issues that you also get the benefit of.
The ads of nineteen sixty seven in a magazine Whi's
always fun. I'm sorry. This is nineteen sixty nine when
it finally.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Came in, right, the Summer of Love, right, that's.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Right, one of them. This was when everything started to change.
People started. There was a biologist name Gardner Moment who said,
you know what we should And it's interesting that this
was a biologist, but this guy came out and was like, hey,
you know what, we need to finish what our forefathers started,
(36:33):
and we need to make them extinct in the United States.
And not only that, but the common rat in the
fire ant, some kinds of sharks that seats fly this
guy was like, let's wipe out anything that bothers humans
or is a potential threat to humans.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
If a biologist can be a hack, Gardner Moment was
a hack biologist. Agree, that's just a terrible idea, and
it's not like that was just like the zeitgeist. People
arguing it, like Gardner Moment introduced it to the zeitgeist,
or at least kind of stoked any existing feelings in
the public. And so now all of a sudden there
was like a push to get rid of grizzly bears
(37:10):
because they wouldn't behave around the humans that had invaded
their areas.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, luckily that didn't happen, right. I think there were
more people, or I don't know about more, but there
were people beating the drum on the other side of like, no,
this is not something we should do, and they went out.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, real biologists, grizzly biologists. They're known as the father
of grizzly Fathers of grizzly biology. They were twin brothers,
Frank and John Craighead, and they became the Philischaffley of
the movement to eradicate bears. They just almost single handedly
gotten the way of that and managed to swing public
(37:46):
sentiment back toward conservation. And it was a real that
was a real accomplishment because when Jack Olsen wrote Knight
of the Grizzlies, which by the way, there it was
called the Grizzly Bear murder Case in Sports Illustrated.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Right, Oh wow, I'm.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Glad they switched it. When he wrote the actual book
in nineteen sixty nine, he was a disinterested observer, he
was a reporter, but he concluded like that was the
fate of the Grizzlies. They were goners, Like the public
had turned against them so much that it was all
but already done. So the Craighead brothers managing to turn
(38:27):
public sentiment like that was a big deal. And they
did it by saying, like, there's just a few common
sense things we need to do, and if we do them,
you're going to basically get rid of human bear interactions
or deaths by grizzly bear.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah. And they actually had research. They weren't just saying,
you know, this is what we think. They had a
full decade of human grizzly interaction and they could point
to actual stuff and say no, no, no, this is what
we have found. And they cited this research. And this
is a great quote. I think it was John that said,
you know, getting rid of all these bears, he said,
(39:02):
would be as tragic as the leveling of Yellowstone Canyon
because somebody fatally fell from its brink. Yeah, like, you
don't go knocking down the mountain because someone fell off
of it, And you don't go killing all the grizzlies
because they killed somebody.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Jack Kerouac said, you can't fall off a mountain. Did
he really, Yeah, it was in the Dharma Bums.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
I read that one. It's been a while.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
So the common sense stuff that they pointed out, where
like keep humans out of some parts of the park.
It's like, sorry, this is bear territory. Just leave it
to the bears. Don't go back there, it's too dangerous
for you. Step one, at least another is just like
actually monitor bears, like start tracking the bears in the park,
(39:43):
know them, get to know who they are, and then
also like when they're moving around, you should probably have
a good idea of where they are and win and
who's around them. And basically just teach the public that
Yogi bear is fictitious, not a real bear. He lives
in Jellystone you're in Yellowstone. Big difference, right, And if
(40:04):
they do that, but also teach the public like, yes,
they're a risk. You're at greater risk outboating on one
of the lakes. But they are still a risk, so
treat them as such. They're a wild animal. But yes,
go see them and take in their majesty, but from
afar like that would definitely reduce encounters and thus the
chances of bears killing humans.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah, and if you've been to a national park at
all in the last well, since this really then what
you see are bearproof garbage cans. I actually bought these
for my camp. I have bearproof stuff at my camp.
Bearproof garbage cans. You're going to see where you're cooking
area should not be where you sleep. You're going to
(40:47):
see these cables strung between trees or you're encouraged and
they teach you how to do it yourself. So you
hang up your food high off the ground, suspended between
trees at night. You can't just loop it over a
branch because they'll climb up that tree. You gotta suspend
it to pain in the butt, but you got to
do it. And you know this stuff now you can't
go to a national park or go back country camping
without seeing signs and just knowing everything that we know
(41:11):
now has all been in place literally because of this
night that all came out of this, that you shouldn't
have food around your camp, You cannot entice bears. Don't
get that candy bar near your windshield, Like this is
not how we should be treating bears.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, and I think also a general idea that your
bad behavior might not result in your death, but you're
increasing the chances that it could kill someone else. So
there was a collective responsibility that was put upon visitors
to the park too, and I think that was super helpful. Yeah,
like we said, there was a this changeover wasn't just
(41:48):
without fault. Apparently Yellowstone was just they just shut down
the garbage dumps like they were like no more garbage
for bears. Smart, I mean what you would do in
response to something like the Night of the Grizzlies. But
the Craighead brothers had said, like, don't do that, Like, yes,
shut them down, but do it gradually and start supplementing
(42:09):
their food that you're taking away from them with actual
food of theirs, like elk or something like that, and
they didn't do that, and as a result, the bears
were now made more appearances at campgrounds looking for food
because the dumps have been shut down, and it ended
up in more bare deaths and the death of a
camper in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Yeah, I mean it's basically saying it's basically like having
a food store for a wild animal that they know
is always open, and then they just shut that food
store down all of a sudden. The bear doesn't know
that they're going to keep coming back there. They're going
to be confused. It will take them a long time
to learn that there's not food there to go elsewhere,
which is why the Craighead said to do it gradually.
(42:51):
It makes sense, but just rash decisions were made, Like
you said, in seventy two, another camper was killed. This
was an illegal campsite I think, and you know had
left their food out, so that's what happened. They still
killed a lot of bears. I think one hundred and
eighty nine bears were killed between sixty eight and seventy three,
(43:14):
and by nineteen seventy five, between those killings and then
the lack of food, there were only one hundred and
thirty six grizzlies left in Yellowstone, prompting them to be
placed on the Endangered Species list and covered by the
Endangered Species Act. They've made a very nice recovery such
I believe they have six recovery zones starting in the
(43:35):
early nineties, one of which was in Glacier and one
around Yellowstone where they you know, were trying to have
reintroduced these bears. And now they are up to a
couple of thousand I think in the US.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Yeah, yeah, I think nearly two thousand.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah. I mean such that there are people now that
are saying, like, hey, we should let people hunt bear
again in the US.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, yeah, which is a great idea. Do it. Of course,
we should really get that instinct of killing a large
trophy animal for bragging rights back as soon as we
possibly can.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
That's sarcasm.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, And so that didn't do a way like it's
not the end of bear killings among humans, like it
does happen. Actually, twenty twenty three has seen four different
deaths from three different bear attacks just this year alone
in I think national parks in the United States. That's
pretty significant because it is really really rare despite you know,
(44:34):
events like that. The National Park Service estimates that if
you visit a national park you have a one in
two point seven million visits chance of being injured, not killed,
injured by a bear. But if you stay in the
developed areas like the roads and everything and don't go
into back country, you have a one in thirty nine
(44:56):
point six million chance of being injured by a bear.
But it it cuts both ways because if you do
go back country camping overnight, you have a one in
five hundred and fifty four thousand overnight visits chance of
being injured by a bear. So it really depends on
where you go and what you do, and if you
put yourself out there in bear country, you have to
(45:16):
come prepared.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, I've done. I mean, you know, we've got my
little black bears at my camp that I've caught them
my camp camp. But these are the you know, the
little guys in Georgia and they No one has literally
ever been killed by a bear in Georgia. But I've
done a lot of camping in back country, camping out
west over the years, and I never saw a bear.
You know, it's if you're smart, It doesn't mean it
(45:40):
can't happen, but like you said, the chances are very remote,
but you got to be smart. You got to do
the right thing with your food and your trash, be
good steward of the land. Back in the late sixties,
it was I think at one point Olivia said that
they were starting to clean up a little bit then,
and they got three helicopters worth of trash just out
of this one area of glacier. People. This is the
(46:01):
time when people just go back country camping, not everyone probably,
and just leave their stuff another yeah, and just leave
their garbage. And it's a Thankfully, we've come a long
way since then, and even though that still happens, I
guarantee you every time there's a bear incident in the
United States, it is highly scrutinized and studied, and they're
(46:22):
still trying to learn from it.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yep, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:26):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (46:27):
All right, Well, if you want to know more about
bear attacks, go familiarize yourself, especially if you're going to
a national park. And since I said that, it's time
for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
One Hammond clock. Remember we talked about the Lawrence Hammond episode.
He made those clocks.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Oh yeah, the tickless clock.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah, Tim and Sarah have one and it's beautiful. Hey, guys,
listening to the Lawrence Hammond episode and had to write in.
My wife's parents owned a Delhi in Brooklyn and had
a Hammond electric clock hanging up for many years. When
they passed on, the clock came to our possession not
in the greatest shape. I was able to clean it
up and discovered that it also had low voltage light
(47:07):
bulbs on the inside. It took some time to find them,
but I got that working too. My wife never knew
that the face lit up all those years. That's super cool.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
During my online searches for bulbs, I had read about
the uniqueness of the Hammon electric clock. One thing he
did differently from all the other electric clock manufacturers at
that time was his clock requires a restart when the
power goes out and comes back on. The other people's
clocks start right back up automatically, And Hammond designed it
the way on purpose. And I agree one hundred percent
(47:37):
with the design decision. We know exactly what time the
power went out. Think about it. Even if the clock
automatically restarts after a power outage, you still have to
adjust the time. Anyway, the man really did have an
analytical mind and thought of just about everything. And I
think I agree Tim. That is from Tim and Sarah.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Nice Tim and Sarah, thank you very much. So it
was a great email. I guess they send a picture
of the clock all lit up.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
They sent a picture later because I was like, why
didn't you send a picture?
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Oh, I want to see it. Did they send it
to both of us?
Speaker 1 (48:07):
I'm not sure, but if not, I'll afford it to you.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
That's very kind of you. And that was Sarah and
Sarah and Tim. Yes, thank you guys again. And if
you want to be like Tim and Sarah, you can
send us an email too. Send it off to stuff
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey everyone, we want to let you know and remind
you that our first ever Stuff you Should Know episode
on Vinyl a podcast LP is out an available for purchase.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, and the episode is vinyl. Our episode on Vinyl
is now available on vinyl. If you can wrap your
heads around that.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
That's right. And they're beautiful. They look amazing. We partnered
with Born Losers Records and they were great to work
with and it's just a real feather in our cap
to be able to hold some Stuff you should Know
physical media.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Finally, Yeah, and they make a great holiday gift for
the stuff you should Know fan in your life, a
great Halloween gift, a great Canadian Thanksgiving gift, a great
regular Thanksgiving gift. They're appropriate for all those jams.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
So just go to syskvinyl dot com and order yours now.
They ship out on October twentieth. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's here too, and this
is Stuff you Should Know. Let's go. How do you
like that one?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I did? I'd also like his title that Livia gave
this one. Yes, it's very fun. Can I read it?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (01:15):
The Night that Transformed Bear human relations.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It's pretty straightforward and says everything you need to say.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah, it's actually sadly very accurate.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah. And yet despite it being that straightforward, there's a
pretty interesting story hidden amid those letters.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Sounds like a crossword clue it does.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I feel like we should tell that story now or else? Really?
What are we doing here? Chuck?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
All right, well, I think this is one of those
Unfortunately we can't just sort of play out as a
teaser to reveal what happens. I think we kind of
need to say what actually happened and then tell that story. Yeah,
all right, did you want to tease this thing out?
Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, and justult.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Because what we're talking about is a very sad night
August of nineteen sixty seven when two young women, two
nineteen year old women were killed by two and here's
the kicker, two different bears in two different places in
the same National park. If it was one bear that
(02:22):
just went crazy or something and they were all camping together,
that would be obviously tragic, but not like, Hey, we
need to really look at what's going on here. And
that's what happened, because it was two bears in two places.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, And the reason why it was such a kicker
is because in the fifty seven years leading up to
that that Glacier National Park was a national park, only
three other people had ever been killed by grizzly bears.
And then all of a sudden, it went from three
people in fifty seven years to two women in two
separate incidents in one night. That is crazy, and it
(02:54):
really did kick off this a national conversation about should
grizzly bears stay alive as a species because we like
living in national parks? Do we have the right to
do that kind of thing. It's a pretty interesting story.
It's got a lot of facets to it. And I
feel like we should talk a little bit about grizzly
bears first, because I didn't realize that they were just
(03:16):
a subspecies of brown bear, although that makes a lot
of sense.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, grizzlies are brown bears. They are generally darker than
brown bears in coloring. They're generally smaller. They can be
you know, a couple hundred pounds up to about six hundred,
but they And it's interesting here because I think it
depends on where you live and here you ask. Like,
usually brown bears are called brown bears. When they're more coastal,
(03:43):
like the ones you see like grabbing that salmon out
of the river, you would call a brown bear. I
thought that was a grizzly, whereas if you live inland
and you're a bear, a brown bear, you're called a grizzly.
But then I also saw people talking about coastal grizzlies,
so it may be one of those names is just
sort of been tacked onto a lot of kind of
brown bears.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, I think it's just, you know, it's confusing.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, but they're brown bears.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, they're brown bears, which makes them, you know, and
they're relatively small brown bear. There's a type of brown
bear called a kodiak that gets up to ten feet
tall when it's standing on its hind legs.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
No, thank you.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Grizzlies are not nearly that big, but they're still big enough.
I mean, the males can get up to about six
hundred pounds, and there used to be a lot more
of them than there are today. The early nineteenth century,
I think, I think around the time of Lewis and
Clark there was an estimated fifty thousand to one hundred
thousand grizzly bears. They went all the way from Canada
(04:42):
down to Mexico. They were in every what's now states
along the West, all the way over to the Great Plains.
There was a ton of them. And then as we
started to move out there, we meaning white American settlers
and colonists. Part of what that whole West were expansion
included was not just wiping out Native Americans, it was
(05:04):
also wiping out large carnivores too.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, like when they talk about taming the West, that's
what they mean. It's like, let's go out there and
kill things. And they did this for a few reasons.
Sometimes it was because they had cattle that they wanted
to take care of, or you know, occasionally if they
thought they were in harm's way, they might kill a bear.
But a lot of it was just that sort of
(05:28):
I was about to say human nature, but really man's nature,
at least some men, not me or you, to want
to kill big, beautiful animals because they're big and beautiful,
and you know, I guess could be considered dangerous.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, you got to keep an eye on those people
because they can very quickly become real like most dangerous
game types.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
So by the time nineteen sixty seven rules around, when
the two nineteen year old women who died lost their lives,
and I'll just go ahead and say their names are
Julie Helgeson Man and Michelle Coon's. By the time they
died in August of nineteen sixty seven, grizzly bears had
been wiped out so thoroughly that they had a territory
(06:13):
that was about two percent of what it had once been.
Mostly they were in national parks because those were protected areas,
and there was something like under a thousand of them
in the entire continental United States.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, that's two percent is great when you're talking milk.
It's not great when you're talking about animal populations.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Did you write that one down?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I didn't. It just gained.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
I mean it still present.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Here's the weird thing, though, is, and it seems rather counterintuitive,
there were there were more even though there were fewer bears,
there were more human encounters with these bears for this
very reason. And as we'll see, this is what part
of what led to this huge mess. And it's really
hard to if you're our age and maybe obviously younger.
(06:59):
You don't realize that National parks weren't always these places
where they really were smart about everything they did right,
because at the time, they would do some crazy things
in national parks. They would try and get bears around,
they would leave food out, they would There was one
story here that Livia found where and luckily a park
(07:21):
ranger kind of stopped this in the act. But these
parents brought a bear over with some food with a
candy bar and then tried to put their eighteen month
old on this bear's back to take a picture.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah, there's a story in that same article about a
guy who was trying to lure a bear into his
car to get a photo of it behind the wheel. Yeah,
just people interacting with giants. Again, six hundred pound grizzly bears.
They can just take your head clean off if they
want to. But that's the thing. They are really unpredictable,
and for the most part, they're vegetarians. I think plants
(07:53):
make up something like ninety percent of their diets, and
a lot of times they're I don't want to say docile.
But the eight month old baby survived, and so did
the mom. And so did the dad. If that bear
had acted any differently, they wouldn't have survived. So I
saw that their personalities can best be summed up as unpredictable.
But at the time in the sixties, that is not
(08:14):
the impression people had of bears. They were kind of
considered a lot more gentle. There was a park ranger
who was quoted by Jack Olsen who will meet in
a little while, who said that on a scale of
a danger scale, where a butterfly is a zero and
a rattlesnak is a ten, the grizzlies of Glacier Park
would have to rate somewhere between zero and one. That
(08:37):
is entirely wrong. He really should have said they rate
between a zero and a ten. And you have no
idea which what it's going to be at any given moment.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
If you encounter a bear, yeah, and you know, like
a lot of large animals like this, when there is
a you know, their accident. So I'm gonna call it
an accidental killing. Because bears weren't like, ooh, human, let
me eat them, like you said. They're mostly vegetarian, and
even when they ate stuff that was non vegetarian, it
wasn't like oh boy, let me go chow down on
(09:07):
that person. It was let me go chow down on
that person's steak by the fire or the fish that
they're cooking, or something like that. And so when there
is an accident, it's usually one of a couple of things.
It's either the sort of familiar scenario where you stumble
upon a bear and scare them, or they may have
their cubs around them. I be a mama with some cubs,
or it is that bear that's like, wait a minute,
(09:30):
that's my food. You're eating that fish out of that river.
I want it, so let's go. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Apparently they defend their food like it's like with the
most jealous violence that they need to like, that is
their food, even if it's your food.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, exactly, because that bear thinks it's their food because
it's their territory. And the other thing that Livia was
keen to point out, which is like it sounds sort
of funny at first, but it really is a thing
that you need to pay attention to, is the Yoga
Bear cartoon was a big thing, and Yogi and Booboo
as these sort of friendly bears going after the picanic
(10:08):
basket that came about, because that's what it was like.
It wasn't like someone said, I got this crazy idea,
let's take these ferocious animals and make them a hand
of Barbara and let's make them into a lovable cartoon character.
It was like, No, that's when you went to these
national parks. Like you said, people are luring bears around.
They're like, ooh, take my picanic basket. If I can
(10:30):
take a picture, pick a picture, pick a picture. Yeah,
going to make that into a cla picnic thing. Anyway,
That's how things were. So that's why they made that cartoon,
and that was just sort of what was going on.
Like they literally at Glacier at one Oh I'm sorry,
this is at Yellowstone, but they were doing similar things
in Glacier. At Yellowstone they put bleachers up around the
(10:54):
open air dumps so people could show up and watch
the bear show, which was bears wandering in to eat.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah. So a lot of people rightfully lay a lot
of the blame for the deaths in nineteen sixty seven
at the feet of the administrators of national parks at
the time, because they were using the bears as entertainment
and at the very least even if they weren't in
some of the parks, they were not instructing the public
on how to interact with bears and just how dangerous
(11:20):
bears were. And that was a huge problem because, like
you said, people were treating them like they were just
these docile, gentle animals that wouldn't do them any harm.
And then the other factor that kind of gets overlooked
is that this is right after the national highway system
had really been developed and people were hitting the road.
So these national parks were suddenly just swamped with tourists
(11:41):
for the first time in their history. So people were
there were far fewer bears, but there were a lot
more people all up in the bear's grills than there
ever had been in human history.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, and leading up to this specific incident, and we'll know,
we'll detail a little bit more of this after I
guess we'll take a break here in a couple of minutes.
But at Glacier there were sort of in the days
leading up, there were a lot of alarming incidences where
bears were becoming way more aggressive or if you're watching
a cartoon, way more friendly than they had been. There
(12:13):
were fires that came through the park in the summer
of sixty seven, so that shrank their habitat some and
kind of squeezed them into a smaller area. And there
was one bear in particular that had been reported a
few different times. I went back, I'm sure you did too,
and read this great original Sports Illustrated article. Who was
it that wrote that?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Jack Olson?
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, jack Olson is kind of the standard account of
this horrific event. But this bear was an emaciated female
who is underweight. Had been reported a lot going up
to people being very brazen and you not like typically
when you see a bear, if you ever watch these
outdoor shows, you start yelling at the bear, like get
(12:55):
out of here, and clanking a pot and the bear
usually he's gonna leave. Bears are scared and they don't want
to be around people. But this bear was not taking
any orders and not doing any of the things that
a bear would usually do. It would just come into
a camp and start eating and not leave until they
wanted to leave. This skinny lady bear right.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So we have in the Western National Park System a
situation where bears have become acclimated to humans. They're totally
fine with being really close to humans, kind of not
scared of us. And then also they had become habituated
on human food and garbage, and they now associated humans
(13:35):
with food and they were no longer scared of humans.
There were a huge population of bears in the western
parks with lots of humans coming to see them.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
All right, well, that sounds like a very natural place
to stop, thanks and never come back, but we do.
We have to tell this bad story, so we'll be
back right after this, all right, So we're going to
(14:22):
take this one horrible incident at a time, and we're
going to start with the story of you mentioned earlier,
Julie Helguson. Man, that is really hard. For some reason,
it is I want to say a different word, but
it's Julie Helgason. She was from Minnesota, and she was
nineteen years old. Along with her friend that we're going
(14:45):
to meet who also lost her life, Michelle Coons. They
were both working summer jobs at Glacier. I imagine in the
late sixties at Glacier it was probably pretty great. I mean,
Glacier is an amazing place even today, but back then,
I imagine it was a pretty awesome summer job to have.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, So I think Julie was working in the laundry
facility and Michelle was working in a gift shop. And
that makes the whole thing even more bizarre to me
because they knew each other. They both set out on
separate hikes on the afternoon of Saturday, August twelfth, nineteen
sixty seven, and they knew each other well enough that
Julie and her crew invited Michelle or no vice versa.
(15:24):
Michelle and her crew of five other friends and a
dog named Squirt invited Julie and her friend I'm getting
boyfriend vibes, Roy duke It to join them. But Michelle
and her group were going somewhere. I think they were
going to Trout Lake, and Julie and Roy had been
(15:46):
to Trout Lake the weekend before, so they wanted to
go in a different hike to Granite Park. She La
and they all set out, and these were experienced hikers.
They knew what they were doing, and they were off
to have a good weekend overnight camping trip out in
the woods. In the back country is what they call it,
but the back country is another word for wild territory.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
That's right, I imagine they you know, we say they
knew each other imagine it was a pretty tight knit
group back then. There are many many more employees now
at these national parks and there were back then, and
you know these they were the same age, and they
were teens working this like amazing summer job. So we're
talking about Helgeson and du Kat at this point, they
(16:26):
hitchhiked to the and if you've ever driven down this road,
it's amazing. It's called going to the Sun road. The
main roadways it is, but it's really great. Well it's
really not because you don't actually go to the sun
it we'd be going toward the Sun road would be
what it should be called. But they went to spend
the night at this chalet initially, but the chalet was full,
(16:48):
and so back in the days where when you could
be surprised by something like that, and when they got there,
they they saw it was full and they said, all right,
well we'll just go camp about five hundred yards away.
We'll go camp in the woods sort of the immediate backcountry,
and they ate dinner, they watched the sunset off that road,
and they take it. They didn't have tents because they
(17:08):
thought they were going to be the chalet. No, so
they just bedded down in their sleeping bags on the
ground outside.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I've seen sleeping bag. Oh, that's why I took it
to possibly be her boyfriend.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
But you could have zipped them together. That'll move.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
There's one thing that yeah, I guess so I forgot
you could do that. There's one thing we should say
about the chalet Granite Park chalet that they hiked to
and were camping near. That was the site of a
purposeful feeding area that the managers of the chalet were
throwing out food scraps to attract the bears for the
(17:42):
entertainment of their guests. And just four days before this,
some rangers had visited Granite Park chalet saw what they
were doing and we're like, you can't do that, stop
doing that, And the manager were like, sure, sure, we'll
definitely stop doing that. So these guys are open air
camping about five football fields away from that very shellet.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
That's right. So after they're in their bags at night,
just after midnight, a bear arrived, grizzly bear to their
camping spot. And you know, some of this stuff has
come out later in different forms, whether it was interviews
with survivors after the fact, or that sports Illustrated story
or them writing about it years later, and they've tried
(18:23):
to piece it together as best they can. But I
did see some of the details kind of varied here
and there among the accounts. But what we do know
is that Ducott said later on that Julie had seen
the bear and woke him up and said, hey, there's
a bear here. And from what I read in Sports Illustrated,
it was about ten feet away, but it was definitely
a bear, and so she's like played dead. The bear
(18:45):
did not fall for that and began mauling Ducott got
to his arms, his legs and his back and then
left him alone and then dragged poor Julie Helgeson off.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, and so Ducott and there were other people camping nearby,
and you know, the chalet was five football fields away,
but there was probably help there. So they were screaming there,
using their flashlights to flash sos and they managed to
get the attention of some people who called for a helicopter,
and they came and got Ducat and he said, well,
don't forget Julie. She's out there somewhere. Apparently a ranger
(19:21):
who would have been in charge of sending out the
search party waited about two hours before he finally said, okay,
let's go out and find her because he was concerned
about putting other people's lives in danger, additional lives and
danger searching for her because we might run into that
bear and that I don't know if that caused her death.
(19:42):
I mean, the bear caused her death, but that might
have helped seal her fate. Two hours, Yeah, that was
two hours they finally found her. This happened just after midnight. Remember.
They finally found her and got her to the chalet
at three forty five am, and she died at four
to twelve am. She we had puncture wounds to her
throat and lungs, but she probably had died largely of
(20:05):
blood loss and it entered shock and that was it.
So I don't you can't really say, yes, she definitely
would have survived, but perhaps her chances of survival would
have been higher had they gone out and searched for
and founder a couple hours earlier.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, I think for sure. My initial reaction was to be,
you know, like, what the heck with this ranger? But again,
this is nineteen sixty seven, it was a different time.
They didn't have the resources they do now they didn't.
I'm sure now if there's any kind of bear situation,
they A they know exactly what to do and exactly
how to handle it, and B they have I would
(20:43):
imagine they have all kinds of tranquilizers or just more
guns and stuff to deal with this kind of thing
that they didn't have back then. I mean, it sounded
like if they would have gone after this bear, it
might have been one park ranger who maybe had a pistol,
maybe didn't, and then a bunch of other people with
you know, baseball bats or something like. They weren't prepared.
(21:03):
So I tried not to judge too harshly that this
guy said, hey, let's wait, because they had never encountered
something like this before.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
And I think rightfully so, like people don't usually make
decisions out of cowardice. It's normally there's some other line
of thinking that in hindsight proved to be a bad decision.
So that was the unfortunate death of Julie Helgeson. She
was very terribly mauled and died of blood loss and
(21:31):
wounds to her lungs and throat. Michelle Coons just hours later,
essentially around the same time that Julie Helguson was dying
in a makeshift operating room at the chalet, a bear
was wandering up to Michelle and her her group's sleeping
(21:53):
bags that they had set up around a campfire and
a beach, because that same bear had already visited them
all the way back at eight pm and caused them
to split.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah, that bear came up. This bear came back
a few times. It was it was a very kind
of one of those things. Again, in hindsight, you're like,
they should have gotten out of there, but you know
what kind of detail, all the reasons why they had
gone fishing. They set up by this great lake, not
capital great lake, but this amazing lake. No, right, they
(22:26):
went fishing. They're one of the guys that was with
them was just sixteen years old, like these were kids,
you know. And he caught one fish. He caught a
rainbow trout, augmented that meal with some hot dogs, grilled
it up, and that grizzly, like you said, at eight pm,
came wandering around and they took off. They watched this
bear from a short distance eat that food and then
(22:49):
grab one of their backpacks and take it away. And
this is a point where like they could have gotten
the heck out of there, but they were like, it's
getting dark, we don't know what to do. This bear left.
It got our food, so it's probably fine now, right.
And also, if we're going to get out of here,
we got to go through this berry bush field that
are you know, that's tall berries or bears love those berries,
(23:10):
so they're you know, that bear may be there, there
may be may be more bears. So let's go down
here to the beach area. Let's build a huge fire
to try and help keep the bear away. And they
built a log barricade between that fire and their old
campsites and then line their sleeping bags up around this campfire.
But very key here they did bring some food. They
(23:32):
brought some cookies and some cheese its so to that
new campsite.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
So is that the idea that that that was what
attracted the bear back again? The food, Yeah, the cheese its.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
I mean it was food and thereafter food.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
So okay, we should also say one other thing. As
they were before they even reached Trout Lake in the afternoon,
when they were on their hike to it, they passed
some other hikers who said that they had been recently
chased up a tree by a grizzly around that bear
nuts to that we're gonna keep going, and that that
same bear they believe. Also, it turned out actually they
(24:08):
not even they didn't believe it, like it was that
same troublesome bear that had been chasing girl scouts around
and had had been a problem all summer because it
was underfed and emaciated. And apparently that's a really good
way for a bear to start acting and behaving very
oddly and aggressively, is when it's underfed.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
That's right. So this same bear that has been overly
aggressive toward everybody it meets, it seems like, came back
again after the eight o'clock visit, came back at three
am in the middle of the night. One of them
wakes up, sees that that fire is has basically died out,
and he jumped up things. The guy who caught the
trout jumped up to go start rebuilding this fire again
(24:52):
really quickly, and apparently set those cookies down on that
log barrier that they had between it and the old
camp site. So now it's three am. They all decide
the bear takes these cookies and goes away, and they
all decide, listen, we're gonna stay awake for the rest
of the night because now we're out here in the
(25:13):
middle of the night, we're genuinely stuck, like we can't
just hike off in the darkness, and so they decide
to all stay awake together.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So, man, I would have been quite scared by this time.
This is the second time the bear visited, right.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah, eight o'clock PM, three am, constantly just taking this food.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And then now we get back to four thirty am
when the bear returns a final time, and this time
it just goes straight up aggressive. I don't know if
it was because they ran out of food and the
bear didn't like the fact that they didn't have any
more food or what, but it bit one of the
guys sleeping bags. It clowted his sweatshirt. So now we
get back to four thirty am when that bear returns
(25:53):
a final time, and I don't know if it was
because they had run out of food and the bear
didn't like that very much, but it became more aggressive
than the other times, and it actually started attacking the
kids in this camping group. One of them had its
sleeping bag bitten, which if a bear's attacking you and
it bites your sleeping bag, that's kind of best case scenario.
(26:14):
Clawed his sweatshirt, and I think there was other bear
encounters in this event.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Right, Yeah, so that was Paul Donne. He starts screaming,
He runs away and climbs a tree. This bear is
chasing him. He runs away and he climbs a tree.
This kid's sixteen, So he's up this tree in a
matter of seconds. Apparently he did get all cut up
in stuff though, because he didn't have a shirt on
and he was, you know, climbing like a person scared
of a bear. Sure, so he gets up in this tree,
(26:41):
and from up in this tree, he looks down and
this bear is sort of circling below him. His friends
are at the camp. They have obviously woken up at
this point, and they see the bear circling the tree,
so that they use that as their opportunity to get away.
They grab that dog first of all, Squirt, And yeah,
they grab Squirt when this thing first started happening. They
(27:03):
grabbed it and put it inside the sleeping bag and
literally like had their hand over this dog's poor dog's
mouth like to try and play dead. But so they
finally get away as well. They run away while this
bear is circling the tree below Paul Dunn and except
for one person, and that was Michelle Coons. She they
hear there, literally, you know, thirty forty feet away from
(27:28):
this bear and their friend, and they hear her screaming.
They're like, you know, get out of there, get out
of there. They hear her yell, I can't he's got
the zipper. They hear her yell, he's ripping my arm.
He's got my arm. My arm is gone. And then
they finally hear her yell, oh my god, I'm dead,
and this bear carries her off in the sleeping bag,
(27:50):
still right right in front of them.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, so they are. They have no trouble staying awake
for the rest of the night. At this point. They
couple hours later, the sun came up, and after it
did and they saw that the bear was gone, they
took off for help. Right.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, that was a you know, in these parks, I'm
sure they still have stuff like this, said what's called
seasonal rangers that were maybe just there for the summer.
And there was a guy named Bert Gildart, and he
said at six thirty in the morning, he was at
West Glacier at this point in his little apartment, he
got a knock from another ranger named Norm Hagen, and
(28:29):
Guildhart was the one who knew about that previous killing
earlier in the night. And I'm not sure how, but
somehow he managed to go back to sleep, and he's
the one that got the emergency responders there. Hagen shows
up and says that there's a young woman who is
mauled at Trout Lake. And he was like, no, no, no,
you're confused. This was over at the chalet. And then
(28:49):
as you know, this Hagen guy keeps going, it dawns
on him, like, my god, what has happened. This has
happened twice in a matter of hours.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, So he very quickly out of himself over to
Trout Lake. I read that he essentially ran four miles
from the trailhead to the lake and there was another
ranger already there named Leonard Landa and two other men
arrived by helicopter and they formed a little search party,
and very quickly Leonard Landa discovered Michelle Kuhon's body. And
(29:22):
you had said earlier that like grizzly bears just generally
don't see humans as prey or as food, and one
of the things that makes them so unpredictable is they'll
do that sometimes sometimes they do see us as prey
and food. Like sometimes they'll attack one person in a
party see them as food, and then attack the other
people that defend that first person that they see as food.
(29:45):
And that seemed to be the case also with Michelle Coons,
because when her body was discovered, the bear had begun
eating it. And another dead giveaway usually is that the
bear will eat some and then go essentially bury the
body under some like dirt and twigs and stuff like that,
and then sit around and protect it. And I don't
(30:06):
know if I don't think they found the bear around
her body. They just found her body, but yeah, but
she had been essentially partially eaten.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Man, all right, I feel like we should take another break.
That is the sad story of what happened that night,
and we're going to talk a little bit about the
aftermath of what happened right after this.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Okay, So that was a big deal, not just in Glacier.
That stuff made it out very quickly and one of
the first responses among park officials was to go find
these bears that did this, and not only that, we
might have a problem with any bear that eats human food.
So Gilder and Landa formed like basically a death squad
(31:13):
looking for bears, especially the one who killed Michelle Kuons,
and they were basically instructed to shoot any bear that
didn't run away from him. And the first day they
didn't find any bears. They stayed overnight at a patrol
cabin at a place called Arrow Lake, and when Gildert
went out to use the bathroom the next morning, he
(31:33):
saw a bear and he called for Landa to bring
out the rifles, and Landa did, and as they were
standing there, giving the bear chance right, because none of
these people wanted to kill bears, there wasn't like vengeance necessarily,
and even if there was, I think actually that's not true.
I think Gildert had a sense of vengeance and then
eventually kind of had a change of heart. But some
(31:54):
of the other rangers were not happy about this job
of killing bears. And even if they, however they felt
about it, you were supposed to still kind of give
the bear a chance. If the bear took a step
towards you, that was a dead bear. If it ran
away from you, that bear could live to you know,
be examined. Another day, this bear started coming toward them,
(32:16):
so they had to kill it.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
That's right. And this was the bear. The bear was
seventeen years old. The bear was under three hundred pounds.
And I know we said their range can be a
couple of hundred and up, but I get the idea
that this was a larger bear that was under three
hundred pounds and like clearly underfed and emaciated. They opened
(32:38):
this bear's stomach jaws movie style and found some a
big ball of blonde hair undigested inside the bear, and
also found this which and this is is all. It's
a tragedy for these humans. It's a tragedy for these
bears because they had been you know, fed human trash
for so long, and we're used to people. It's not
(33:00):
their fault. But they found glass embedded in the molars
of this bear. So this bear had been eating glass
food that was probably in glass from trash and made
it difficult for this bear to eat. Probably probably made
the bear very uncomfortable and grumpy, and that probably all
contributed to what happened to Michelle Kuhon's.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yeah, I think it's really important to remember that none
of this was the bear's fault. The bears were acting
like bears, and they were being essentially mistreated by humans
in the park administrators by allowing them to get habituated
human food, because it was destined. This was destined to
happen essentially the way that people were behaving in the parks.
(33:45):
So they had definitively the bear that killed Michelle Kuhon's.
I mean, they didn't test the hair or anything like that,
but it was just her. Yeah, they were still looking
for Julie Helgeson's bear, and they actually never offinitively identified it.
But another ranger named Dave Shay, who was among a
(34:05):
group of four who shot a bear and her cubs
that were feeding at the Chalet garbage pit, he was
convinced that that was the one that killed Helgeson because
that bear had blood on her claws, and I don't
believe Julie Helguson had any feeding done to her, So
it's not like that could have been an innocent bear
that just came along and was like, oh, I'm going
to have a bite of this but didn't kill her.
(34:27):
It was almost certainly the bear that killed her. And
even if it wasn't, there an orgy of grizzly bear
death fell over Glacier and Yellowstone and the other national
parks that had grizzly bears in the ensuing weeks, months
and years after the Night of the Grizzlies.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Absolutely, like you said, the media got hold of this
and all of of course, all of a sudden, everyone
once got an opinion. Everyone thinks that they know exactly
why this happened. Some people were like, well, there were
thunderstorms and lightning nearby that could have agitated them. The
idea that bears are attracted to minstrual blood was brought up.
(35:07):
I think they now say that that's maybe true with
polar bears.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Only well, they've never experimented with They experimented with polar bears.
Polar bears showed a preference for that and like seal
blood or something, and then they've never experimented like that
with grizzlies. But somebody that did like a once over
of grizzly attacks and didn't find any pattern necessary. So
we don't know experimentally, but we do know anecdotally that's
probably not true.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Right, But at any rate, that doesn't keep the media
from reporting something like this, sure, and then showing up
in Anchorman as a joke years later. But you know,
it was coincidence. There was never any like link between
these two. It was just a really bad coincidence, a
horrific example of bad human luck that night between these
(35:53):
two young women. Jack Olson wrote that story, the Sports
Illustrated Story, which is a really fun read parts and
three separate issues that you also get the benefit of.
The ads of nineteen sixty seven in a magazine Whi's
always fun. I'm sorry. This is nineteen sixty nine when
it finally.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Came in, right, the Summer of Love, right, that's.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Right, one of them. This was when everything started to change.
People started. There was a biologist name Gardner Moment who said,
you know what we should And it's interesting that this
was a biologist, but this guy came out and was like, hey,
you know what, we need to finish what our forefathers started,
(36:33):
and we need to make them extinct in the United States.
And not only that, but the common rat in the
fire ant, some kinds of sharks that seats fly this
guy was like, let's wipe out anything that bothers humans
or is a potential threat to humans.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
If a biologist can be a hack, Gardner Moment was
a hack biologist. Agree, that's just a terrible idea, and
it's not like that was just like the zeitgeist. People
arguing it, like Gardner Moment introduced it to the zeitgeist,
or at least kind of stoked any existing feelings in
the public. And so now all of a sudden there
was like a push to get rid of grizzly bears
(37:10):
because they wouldn't behave around the humans that had invaded
their areas.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, luckily that didn't happen, right. I think there were
more people, or I don't know about more, but there
were people beating the drum on the other side of like, no,
this is not something we should do, and they went out.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, real biologists, grizzly biologists. They're known as the father
of grizzly Fathers of grizzly biology. They were twin brothers,
Frank and John Craighead, and they became the Philischaffley of
the movement to eradicate bears. They just almost single handedly
gotten the way of that and managed to swing public
(37:46):
sentiment back toward conservation. And it was a real that
was a real accomplishment because when Jack Olsen wrote Knight
of the Grizzlies, which by the way, there it was
called the Grizzly Bear murder Case in Sports Illustrated.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Right, Oh wow, I'm.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Glad they switched it. When he wrote the actual book
in nineteen sixty nine, he was a disinterested observer, he
was a reporter, but he concluded like that was the
fate of the Grizzlies. They were goners, Like the public
had turned against them so much that it was all
but already done. So the Craighead brothers managing to turn
(38:27):
public sentiment like that was a big deal. And they
did it by saying, like, there's just a few common
sense things we need to do, and if we do them,
you're going to basically get rid of human bear interactions
or deaths by grizzly bear.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah. And they actually had research. They weren't just saying,
you know, this is what we think. They had a
full decade of human grizzly interaction and they could point
to actual stuff and say no, no, no, this is what
we have found. And they cited this research. And this
is a great quote. I think it was John that said,
you know, getting rid of all these bears, he said,
(39:02):
would be as tragic as the leveling of Yellowstone Canyon
because somebody fatally fell from its brink. Yeah, like, you
don't go knocking down the mountain because someone fell off
of it, And you don't go killing all the grizzlies
because they killed somebody.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Jack Kerouac said, you can't fall off a mountain. Did
he really, Yeah, it was in the Dharma Bums.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
I read that one. It's been a while.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
So the common sense stuff that they pointed out, where
like keep humans out of some parts of the park.
It's like, sorry, this is bear territory. Just leave it
to the bears. Don't go back there, it's too dangerous
for you. Step one, at least another is just like
actually monitor bears, like start tracking the bears in the park,
(39:43):
know them, get to know who they are, and then
also like when they're moving around, you should probably have
a good idea of where they are and win and
who's around them. And basically just teach the public that
Yogi bear is fictitious, not a real bear. He lives
in Jellystone you're in Yellowstone. Big difference, right, And if
(40:04):
they do that, but also teach the public like, yes,
they're a risk. You're at greater risk outboating on one
of the lakes. But they are still a risk, so
treat them as such. They're a wild animal. But yes,
go see them and take in their majesty, but from
afar like that would definitely reduce encounters and thus the
chances of bears killing humans.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah, and if you've been to a national park at
all in the last well, since this really then what
you see are bearproof garbage cans. I actually bought these
for my camp. I have bearproof stuff at my camp.
Bearproof garbage cans. You're going to see where you're cooking
area should not be where you sleep. You're going to
(40:47):
see these cables strung between trees or you're encouraged and
they teach you how to do it yourself. So you
hang up your food high off the ground, suspended between
trees at night. You can't just loop it over a
branch because they'll climb up that tree. You gotta suspend
it to pain in the butt, but you got to
do it. And you know this stuff now you can't
go to a national park or go back country camping
without seeing signs and just knowing everything that we know
(41:11):
now has all been in place literally because of this
night that all came out of this, that you shouldn't
have food around your camp, You cannot entice bears. Don't
get that candy bar near your windshield, Like this is
not how we should be treating bears.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, and I think also a general idea that your
bad behavior might not result in your death, but you're
increasing the chances that it could kill someone else. So
there was a collective responsibility that was put upon visitors
to the park too, and I think that was super helpful. Yeah,
like we said, there was a this changeover wasn't just
(41:48):
without fault. Apparently Yellowstone was just they just shut down
the garbage dumps like they were like no more garbage
for bears. Smart, I mean what you would do in
response to something like the Night of the Grizzlies. But
the Craighead brothers had said, like, don't do that, Like, yes,
shut them down, but do it gradually and start supplementing
(42:09):
their food that you're taking away from them with actual
food of theirs, like elk or something like that, and
they didn't do that, and as a result, the bears
were now made more appearances at campgrounds looking for food
because the dumps have been shut down, and it ended
up in more bare deaths and the death of a
camper in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Yeah, I mean it's basically saying it's basically like having
a food store for a wild animal that they know
is always open, and then they just shut that food
store down all of a sudden. The bear doesn't know
that they're going to keep coming back there. They're going
to be confused. It will take them a long time
to learn that there's not food there to go elsewhere,
which is why the Craighead said to do it gradually.
(42:51):
It makes sense, but just rash decisions were made, Like
you said, in seventy two, another camper was killed. This
was an illegal campsite I think, and you know had
left their food out, so that's what happened. They still
killed a lot of bears. I think one hundred and
eighty nine bears were killed between sixty eight and seventy three,
(43:14):
and by nineteen seventy five, between those killings and then
the lack of food, there were only one hundred and
thirty six grizzlies left in Yellowstone, prompting them to be
placed on the Endangered Species list and covered by the
Endangered Species Act. They've made a very nice recovery such
I believe they have six recovery zones starting in the
(43:35):
early nineties, one of which was in Glacier and one
around Yellowstone where they you know, were trying to have
reintroduced these bears. And now they are up to a
couple of thousand I think in the US.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Yeah, yeah, I think nearly two thousand.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah. I mean such that there are people now that
are saying, like, hey, we should let people hunt bear
again in the US.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, yeah, which is a great idea. Do it. Of course,
we should really get that instinct of killing a large
trophy animal for bragging rights back as soon as we
possibly can.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
That's sarcasm.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, And so that didn't do a way like it's
not the end of bear killings among humans, like it
does happen. Actually, twenty twenty three has seen four different
deaths from three different bear attacks just this year alone
in I think national parks in the United States. That's
pretty significant because it is really really rare despite you know,
(44:34):
events like that. The National Park Service estimates that if
you visit a national park you have a one in
two point seven million visits chance of being injured, not killed,
injured by a bear. But if you stay in the
developed areas like the roads and everything and don't go
into back country, you have a one in thirty nine
(44:56):
point six million chance of being injured by a bear.
But it it cuts both ways because if you do
go back country camping overnight, you have a one in
five hundred and fifty four thousand overnight visits chance of
being injured by a bear. So it really depends on
where you go and what you do, and if you
put yourself out there in bear country, you have to
(45:16):
come prepared.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, I've done. I mean, you know, we've got my
little black bears at my camp that I've caught them
my camp camp. But these are the you know, the
little guys in Georgia and they No one has literally
ever been killed by a bear in Georgia. But I've
done a lot of camping in back country, camping out
west over the years, and I never saw a bear.
You know, it's if you're smart, It doesn't mean it
(45:40):
can't happen, but like you said, the chances are very remote,
but you got to be smart. You got to do
the right thing with your food and your trash, be
good steward of the land. Back in the late sixties,
it was I think at one point Olivia said that
they were starting to clean up a little bit then,
and they got three helicopters worth of trash just out
of this one area of glacier. People. This is the
(46:01):
time when people just go back country camping, not everyone probably,
and just leave their stuff another yeah, and just leave
their garbage. And it's a Thankfully, we've come a long
way since then, and even though that still happens, I
guarantee you every time there's a bear incident in the
United States, it is highly scrutinized and studied, and they're
(46:22):
still trying to learn from it.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yep, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:26):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (46:27):
All right, Well, if you want to know more about
bear attacks, go familiarize yourself, especially if you're going to
a national park. And since I said that, it's time
for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
One Hammond clock. Remember we talked about the Lawrence Hammond episode.
He made those clocks.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Oh yeah, the tickless clock.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah, Tim and Sarah have one and it's beautiful. Hey, guys,
listening to the Lawrence Hammond episode and had to write in.
My wife's parents owned a Delhi in Brooklyn and had
a Hammond electric clock hanging up for many years. When
they passed on, the clock came to our possession not
in the greatest shape. I was able to clean it
up and discovered that it also had low voltage light
(47:07):
bulbs on the inside. It took some time to find them,
but I got that working too. My wife never knew
that the face lit up all those years. That's super cool.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
During my online searches for bulbs, I had read about
the uniqueness of the Hammon electric clock. One thing he
did differently from all the other electric clock manufacturers at
that time was his clock requires a restart when the
power goes out and comes back on. The other people's
clocks start right back up automatically, And Hammond designed it
the way on purpose. And I agree one hundred percent
(47:37):
with the design decision. We know exactly what time the
power went out. Think about it. Even if the clock
automatically restarts after a power outage, you still have to
adjust the time. Anyway, the man really did have an
analytical mind and thought of just about everything. And I
think I agree Tim. That is from Tim and Sarah.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Nice Tim and Sarah, thank you very much. So it
was a great email. I guess they send a picture
of the clock all lit up.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
They sent a picture later because I was like, why
didn't you send a picture?
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Oh, I want to see it. Did they send it
to both of us?
Speaker 1 (48:07):
I'm not sure, but if not, I'll afford it to you.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
That's very kind of you. And that was Sarah and
Sarah and Tim. Yes, thank you guys again. And if
you want to be like Tim and Sarah, you can
send us an email too. Send it off to stuff
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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