Grizzly bear attack prompts closure of Highline Trail in Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park boasts over 700 miles of maintained hiking trails, with said trails taking trekkers through some of the most beautifully glacier-carved landscapes on the planet.

Perhaps nowhere within the park is more dramatic than the area just south of the Canadian border, where the Lewis Range of mountains sweeps across northern Glacier and southern Waterton Lakes National Parks, respectively. The area features the northern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), the highest peak in both the Lewis Range and the park (Mount Cleveland, at 10,479 feet), each of the Grinnell and Swiftcurrent Glaciers, and dozens of pristine alpine lakes.

Along the western edge of the Lewis Range runs Glacier’s famed Highline Trail, which traverses north out of Logan Pass above Going-to-the-Sun Road, passes both Grinnell Glacier and Granite Park, and eventually overlaps with the CDT as it heads north towards Mount Kipp and Cathedral Peak. While that northern section along the CDT provides big views of Mount Merritt (10,004 feet), Cosley Ridge, and three separate glacier fields, the southern section (which is much closer to Many Glacier Hotel and amenities) is the section that sees some of the most foot traffic of anywhere in the park.

It was in that southern section of the Highline Trail where, in foggy and low-visibility conditions, a 35 year old man was attacked by a grizzly bear late last week. According to the National Park Service, the section of the Highline Trail between Haystack Butte and Granite Park Chalet remains closed until park rangers can confirm that the bear, believed to be a male, is no longer in the area.

The section of the Highline Trail north of the Chalet that overlaps the CDT remains open, as does the CDT in that area of Glacier.

There are no plans to attempt to catch and/or euthanize the bear since it was a ‘surprise encounter’ and the conditions were such that neither hiking party nor bear had the usual time to avoid confrontation. According to John Waller, supervisory wildlife biologist in the park, the group of hikers that included the man bitten ‘was walking into the wind and faced foggy conditions,’ per the NPS press release.

When you’re hiking into the wind, that means your scent isn’t being carried in front of you, so nothing you’re walking towards that has even insanely perceptive olfactory organs can smell you coming. In theory this means the bear’s scent was blowing towards the hiking party, but a) a bear’s sense of smell is over 2,000 more powerful than that of a human and b) do you know what a bear smells like?

As for the bitee, his hiking companions acted fast and hit the bear with potent bear spray which helped end the attack quickly. The man was bitten ‘below the knee,’ but the well-prepared party used a satellite device to contact help and managed to treat the wound with an on-hand first aid kit. The Granite Park Chalet, an Alps-esque backcountry refuge built in 1914, was just a few miles further down the trail, and the group managed to hike their way to the chalet to get the victim airlifted to safety.

While surprise bear attacks can and will happen in these kind of unfortunate conditions, it’s no surprise that they often happen during September. That’s precisely when bears begin their peak belly-stuffing as they prep for a long winter of hibernation – and no, that doesn’t mean they’re out there trying to stuff their bellies with human flesh, it just means they a) are more active than normal as they search for food and b) often use the same trails as humans since that’s’ the path of least resistance to those sweet, sweet thimbleberries, huckleberries, and gooseberries they so love.

Props to this hiking party, who clearly came prepared. When you’re out in bear country – be it grizzly country or merely black bear country – carrying bear spray is always the right idea where it’s allowed. First aid kits and technology to contact help is an incredibly prudent idea as well, and this group had all of that. As a result, their preparedness might not just have saved their buddy’s life, but the bear’s life, too, since the attack was thwarted as a surprise self-defensive chomp before it became thorough enough to prompt hunting him down.