Taken By Bear in Glacier National Park: Harrowing Encounters between Grizzlies and Humans

by Kathleen Snow

Overview

The first-person accounts in Taken by Bear in Glacier National Park provide a you-are-there perspective on human and grizzly bear encounters since the park’s founding in 1910. Most of these encounters have ended peacefully, but many have not. In order to most accurately tell the stories of those involved in the more deadly incidents, Kathleen Snow went directly to the source: the National Park Service archives. With help from personnel at park headquarters, Snow has collected more than 100 years’ worth of harrowing true stories that read like crime scene investigations and provide hard-learned lessons in outdoor safety. A must-read for fans of Taken by Bear in Yellowstone and the classic Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance by Stephen Herrero.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493047512
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	05/01/2020
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	629,427
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kathleen Snow is a member of the Montana Writers Guild and the Outdoor Writers Association of America. Her journalism has been published in Harper’s Magazine and Women in Natural Resources among others. In 2016 The University of Montana Press published Searching for Bear Eyes: a Yellowstone Park Mystery. Her previous novels include historical fiction (Aguhega: a novel of Acadia National Park), and Night Waking, a Manhattan thriller. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Author's Note viii

Part 1 Night of the Grizzlies, 1967

Chapter 1 Finding Julie 2

Chapter 2 Finding Michele 34

Part 2 Fatal Summer of the Grizzlies, 1976

Chapter 3 Finding Mary Pat 60

Part 3 Fatal Summer-Autumn of the Grizzlies, 1980

Chapter 4 Finding Jane and Kim 78

Chapter 5 Finding Larry 97

Part 4 Fatal Spring-Summer of the Grizzlies, 1987

Chapter 6 Finding Chuck 114

Chapter 7 Finding Gary 125

Part 5 Fatal Autumn of the Grizzlies, 1992

Chapter 8 Finding John 138

Part 6 Fatal Spring-Summer of the Grizzlies, 1998 and 2016

Chapter 9 Finding Craig 150

Chapter 10 Finding Brad 161

Part 7 A Century of Near-Death and Significant Maulings

Chapter 11 Finding Johan and Jenna 172

Chapter 12 Finding Kathryn and Kelsy 180

Chapter 13 Finding Jim 187

Chapter 14 Finding Frances and Rob 196

Chapter 15 Finding Roscoe and Teresa 201

Chapter 16 Finding William 210

Chapter 17 Other 1976 Encounters 215

Chapter 18 Finding a Family of Four 226

Chapter 19 Finding Gordon 229

Chapter 20 Finding Bob 236

Chapter 21 Finding Five (Including a Ten-Year-Old) 244

Chapter 22 Finding Joe 252

Chapter 23 Finding Toby 260

Chapter 24 Finding Jack 263

Chapter 25 Finding Slim 269

Chapter 26 Major and Minor Injuries in Brief by Grizzly, Black, and Unidentified Bears 273

Part 8 Trends

Chapter 27 Recent Maulings, 2009-2019 288

Chapter 28 Still Missing and Presumed Dead 297

Chapter 29 What About the Black Bears? 308

Chapter 30 Safer Travel in Glacier Park Bear Country 312

Afterword 319

Notes 321

Bibliography 326

Index 334

About the Author 344

Editorial Reviews

"Bear attacks are multifaceted, fascinating and often chilling events. Snow gives carefully researched and detailed first person accounts of Yellowstone’s National Park’s bear attacks. Her accounts and images inform and let the reader draw their own conclusions. Ms. Snow gives accurate advice regarding how to avoid a bear attack. If you want the details of Yellowstone’s bear attacks told in vivid detail Snow’s book is the place to go.” –Stephen Herrero, author of Bear Attacks and leading authority on bear ecology, behavior, and attacks “Kathleen Snow’s book reads like a series of crime scene reports, only they are not crimes. She uses careful and vivid detail to describe, incident by incident, 142 years of harrowing encounters between grizzly bears and humans in Yellowstone National Park, with a recap of earlier incidents dating back to 1870. These stories, usually told in the words of the people involved, are a non-judgmental but stark reminder of why we need to respect an animal that rightfully symbolizes the wildness in wilderness.” –David Knibb, author of Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight over the Great Bear “Kathleen Snow has done an outstanding job in putting together the details of many Yellowstone bear-human confrontations from numerous sources. She weaves the stories in both a comprehensive and compelling narrative. I have already referenced it during my lectures on bear attacks even while it has been in manuscript form. It is a must-have reference book for anyone interested in human-bear encounters.” –Steven P. French, author of “Bear Attacks” in Wilderness Medicine and cofounder of the Yellowstone Grizzly Foundation “Kathleen Snow has done an excellent job of chronicling the bear/human conflicts in Yellowstone with this book. She paints a picture of each event with her own prose and includes all the official transcripts detailing the events. This contrast between a writer’s view of an incident and the stark forensic details of agency reports allows the reader to imagine each scene from different perspectives. It helps to soften the forensic evidence but also gives a glimpse of the stark reality that rangers and tourists have actually faced every time there is an incident. The bad news is that such incidents will probably always happen as long as we value wild bears and wilderness. The good news is that they rarely do happen, and bears in general go out of their way to avoid them.” –Frank Lance Craighead, author of Bears of the World and executive director of the Craighead Institute “Valuable for its collection of facts.” –Lee H. Whittlesey, author of Death in Yellowstone and Yellowstone Park historian “Kathleen Snow’s exhaustive investigation into bear attacks brings home the message that Yellowstone is a wild, predator-rich ecosystem. While the details of these incidents remind us that our safety in bear country is not guaranteed, Snow provides the latest information on precautions to take to avoid a bear attack.” –Orville Bach, Yellowstone seasonal ranger

From the Publisher