Customer Reviews

Night of the Grizzlies

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I was happy to find a book that told the true story of what happened. I was the helicopter pilot mentioned in the story. With exception of a few minor details, the story was very accurate.

I have read many grizzly books and literature and this one stands alone. It is extremely realistic and the author is incredibly successful in putting the reader right there in Glacier Park with the bears. In a nutshell, this is a terrifying book. When I'm in grizzly country, I sometimes feel foolish with the precautions that I take when other (less-knowledgeable) tourists mindlessly cruise through the wilderness unharmed. This book puts those situations in perspective. That night in 1967, nobody thought the grizzlies were harmful because nobody had been killed in 57 years. The bears proved those tourists all wrong - they are very unpredictable. Buy this book.

If you are an outdoor enthusiast, wait until after your next backcountry excursion to read Night of the Grizzlies, Jack Olsen's true account of two deadly grizzly encounters in Montana's Glacier National Park during the summer of 1968. I read it on my journey home after a week long camping trip with my girlfriend in Montana's Grizzly Country. Had I read it earlier in my trip, I surely would have spent the rest of my nights in sleepless fear and endured some terrifying backwoods hikes. Olsen masterfully sets a scene in which Man and Grizzly continually come into close contact with disaster narrowly averted. Before the attacks in Glacier, Grizzlies were treated as a nuisance in the park by both park officials and visitors alike. Indeed the general feeling at the park was that since no man had ever been killed by a bear in Glacier National Park no man ever would. At Granite Park Chalet, a kind of backcountry "resort", the bears nightly visits to the garbage dump were anticipated and applauded much like an after dinner comic at a Poconos lodge. What makes Olsen's account so strong is that while we sense where this precarious relationship between Man and Bear is going, when it gets there it is more horrifying than we could ever imagine. Outdoorsmen and urbanites alike will not be able to put this book down. The reader will be at once amazed by and terrified of the power and visciousness of the title beasts. Yet as the tale unfolds we see how Man has perhaps brought this tragedy upon himself. We weep for the two young girls who died such violent and gruesome deaths. But we also weep for the Grizzlies who merely wish to live as God intended, in the wilderness far from the smell of Man. Review by Larry Maier, Long Beach NY

In 1972 I had just arrived at Glacier, having driven across the country from Ohio, reading paperback books when it wasn't my turn to drive. I was reading this book the evening we arrived at Glacier (poor planning), and continued reading while my boyfriend set up the tent at a campground. The book was so engrossing, I read through dinner, and continued to read after he turned in. I finished at about 1:00 am, but was too frightened to walk the 20 feet from the car to the tent, so I spent the night, freezing the whole time, in the car. The next day we set out for the trailhead, and I've never, ever been so frightened on a backpacking trip. Yes, I remember the book vividly after more than 30 years!

I read this book a two weeks after returning from hiking the Granite Park Chalet area of Glacier National Park (where one of the victims was killed) and so this book was even more chilling for me. The story is extremely well written and very engaging - I couldn't put it down. Olsen laces criticism of the National Park's policies (at the time of the killings) throughout, and effectively builds a sense in the reader of all the mistakes that had been made. As entertainment, this book will keep you on the edge of your seat. As education, hopefully it will remind us that grizzlies are to be respected and managed carefully, and not treated like public amusements or zoo exhibits.

By the way, if you like this book, also try "Mark of the Grizzly", an excellent collection of bear attack stories which probes beyond the attacks and into the causes. It's up-to-date and really inspires a sense of respect for the great bears.

After reading "Mark of the Grizzly" and "Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance," I felt compelled to know more about bear attacks. I'm an avid backpacker and naturalist, so my interest is both scientific and practical.

This book began slowly, with what I thought was too much background information, but that may be because I already new about Glacier National Park. The events leading up to the attacks, as well as during and after the attacks, were compelling and well-documented. It's a good book for us all to learn from -- how mindsets and bear management at parks has changed and adapted and why they had to adapt due to the unfortunate deaths of hikers, starting with those that are the subject of this book. Also, the book is older, originally written in 1969, I believe. There is a chilling ending to it, in which the author predicts a possible annhiliation of grizzlies due to the increased incidences of attacks on humans. Thankfully, that attitude never fully developed, though it remains a possibility.

Jack Olsen is so good, I felt like I was there in the woods with these people (and with the bears.) I read it on a warm quiet evening in Minnesota, and had the windows open. When something snapped outside in the woods I jumped about 10 feet. It is one of the scariest books I've read, and certainly the spookiest true story. Value this book not only for the chilling true account, but for the lessons it teaches us human beings. This story reminds everyone why we need to have a healthy respect for grizzlies.

This book has held up very well and compares favorably to David Baron's recent book about cougars, The Beast In The Garden, with one huge caveat: In Olson's book we learn nothing at all about the victims or their families. He was an amazing writer to make the reader care about the people while telling us so little. The horror is palpable. Jack Olson went on to become one of the most respected true crime writers, and his early talent for that genre is evident in this book. This is truly a horror story. Very exciting reading, very well written.

An oldie but goodie, this book was first published in 1969. It's about the night in 1967 that two teenage girls were killed in different places and by different bears in Glacier National Park. At that time, there had never been a documented death due to grizzlies in the park (although in the following decades it became the worst place for bear attacks in all the Lower 48 States.)

I'm glad I read this book just a couple of months after reading Bear Attacks and Mark of the Grizzly, because it really allowed me to see the contrast in the way people thought about bears in the 1960's compared to now. The attitude towards bears back then seems so naive. At that time, people were still feeding grizzlies even in the national park (although technically that had been made illegal, the rule wasn't enforced) in order to lure the bears out where they could watch them. Even the author, though aware of the danger of habituated bears, still believed that wild bears (ones not accustomed to humans or to eating human food) were not at all threatening to humans if they were left alone. And the general public clearly believed that national park bears were used to humans and thus harmless and practically tame. But bears that are accustomed to humans and their food are the most dangerous bears of all; and both of the bears who preyed on sleeping humans that night were habituated bears.

The other bear books I read described numerous attacks, but this book concerns just two, so it is able to go into far more detail. It also gives some information which I suspect would be too gory, too personal, and too risky (for possible lawsuits) to be included in a nonfiction book nowadays. All of which makes this the most intensely real and thus the scariest and most horrifying bear attack book of all the ones I've read.

Olsen tells us about the background and personalities of not only the two victims, but also of their companions and the witnesses, rescuers, and bystanders. There was an 11-year-old boy who was the most level-headed of all the bystanders in the chaos and terror of the emergency. His help and practical ideas were to prove crucial to the rescue.

One of the girls, Julie, lived for 4 1/2 hours after the attack, half of which time was spent alone, lying out in the bushes in the dark, never knowing when the bear might return, and in terrible pain, struggling to breathe with both lungs punctured and one lung collapsed as she slowly bled to death. People staying in a nearby lodge could hear her screams and moans throughout the night.

As the only park official present, it fell to a 22-year old novice ranger doing her very first guided tour, to make the call whether or not to attempt a rescue. She had already led a group from the lodge in the rescue of the Julie's companion, who had also been severely mauled but was able to make it to another party's campsite to get help. He survived, begging desperately the whole time for the rescuers to forget about him and go help the girl. But the bear had dragged the girl away. A few of the people at the lodge were insistent about trying to rescue the girl, but the young ranger refused to allow them to go. There were no firearms at the lodge, it was nighttime, and nobody knew where either Julie or the bear was. The risk was too great that they would not be able to save or perhaps even find the girl; and that others would also die in the attempt. (This young ranger did not have all the information and research available to her that we now have, but she made the correct - and very difficult - decision. It accords with today's leading bear attack expert Dr. Stephen Herrero's most up-to-date advice.)

Finally, a helicopter arrived with a team of armed rangers and a rescue could be made. The fight to save Julie's life is perhaps the most intense part of the book. There were three doctors - including a surgeon - among the guests at the lodge, and since the girl's condition was too critical for her to make it to a hospital alive, an improvised operating room was set up in the dining room. The wilderness lodge had no electricity, and the doctors worked by lantern and candlelight. The lantern that provided the main light for the surgery was held by the 16-year-old daughter of one of the doctors.

But 19-year-old Julie's wounds were too great and she had lost too much blood. Although the doctors never gave up and continued to work frantically over her, she died on the "operating" table. She remained conscious to the end, comforted by a priest who was staying at the lodge and who gave her Last Rites. The surgeon said that by the time she received medical attention, she could not have survived even if she had been in a state-of-the-art, fully equipped hospital. But he also said that, had she been rescued sooner after the attack, her life possibly could have been saved.

The other girl, Michele, also 19, was attacked many miles away and on the other side of a mountain range. She is thought to have died quickly, without going through the hours of pain and fear that Julie did. But Michele's death was also horrifying - she died all alone, having been abandoned by her four companions (including her 23-year-old boyfriend) who had fled in terror and all of whom escaped the attack unscathed by climbing trees.

Perhaps the most terrible thing of all is that these deaths were preventable. Park officials knew about the illegal bear-feeding situation in the area where Julie was killed, and that the backpackers' campground there was located right in the middle of a heavily-used grizzly route. The bear who killed Michele had been harassing campers all summer (including a troop of young Brownie Girl Scouts just a couple of days earlier), and many people who complained to the Park Service about it had been told that the aggressive bear would be destroyed. Also, Michele's companions had illegally brought a puppy along. Dogs - especially a young, weak one like theirs - are known to provoke bears to attack, a major reason why they are illegal on national park trails. All of the members of Michele's group were park workers who knew the rule. But when one member raised his concern about bringing the puppy, others lied, saying that it was okay as long as the dog was on a leash.

But the rangers were simply overwhelmed that summer. The weather was abnormally hot, and over 100 lightning strikes had occurred that week. (At the time, this was thought to be the reason for the unusual aggressiveness of the bears, but that theory has been debunked by Dr. Herrero and others.) All of the rangers were working around the clock fighting fires, and there just wasn't anyone available to deal with the problem bears until it was too late.

The story continues with the search for Michele's body, the hunt for the killer bears, and the autopsies that confirmed that the rangers had shot the right bears (along with a couple of other, innocent, ones.) One of the killer bears had two cubs, and the rangers shot at them, wounding one badly in the jaw but not killing it. The cub lived for almost another year, in constant pain and slowly starving to death because its jaw injury made it very difficult to procure food or eat it.

It is a riveting and tragic story that tells us so much more than the news stories ever do. These incidents led to mandatory bear-proofing of garbage and a crackdown on bear-feeding in the national parks - and later, on private land as well - that eventually led to a significant decrease in bear attacks on humans. (But only after a couple of decades of increased attacks.)

(This is a bit off-topic, but important: recently bear attacks have been increasing again, probably due to the ever-increasing number of humans visiting the wilderness. And although supposedly even private landowners in bear territory outside of national parks are now required to bear-proof their garbage, I personally witnessed they they don't always. I was in Cooke City, Montana two days after last July's bear attacks, which included one fatality. We got food from a take-out-only restaurant located about 1/2 mile from the campground where the attacks happened. The restaurant's garbage can was an old oil drum lined with a plastic garbage bag, and it didn't even have a lid. At 11:00 at night it was sitting outside on the porch, out of view of the workers inside. No doubt they bring it in when they close at midnight, but in the meantime, there it was . . . an open invitation to grizzlies to come on over for a little snack. We had to wait outside on the porch right next to the garbage can about half an hour for our food to be cooked. It was a little nerve-racking, and at that point I hadn't even heard about the attacks yet!)

Night of the Grizzlies has some excellent black-and-white photos, including pictures of the victims, the campsites; the doctors, ranger, and other rescuers at the lodge the next day; and the dead bears - even one photo of the bear that killed Michele while it was still alive, taken by one of the Brownie girls a couple of days earlier.

The book ends with a prediction that grizzlies will gradually be transported or destroyed until they are totally eliminated from the Lower 48 States. Fortunately, the four decades since the book was published have proven Jack Olsen wrong about that. But he was also wrong about grizzlies never being a threat to humans if they are left alone.

(222 pages)

This book was definitely a page turner! Anyone who hikes or camps should read this book! Also, it should be an eye opener for people around dump sites or man-made dump sites which would lead to a bear attractive area. Bears and people don't mix and people need to start respecting wildlife more. With the increase of population, where do bears, cougars and other wildlife go? Even though this occurred years ago, this book really makes you think.