Worry about the visitors

By GEORGE OSTROM

Visitors by the thousands, yea millions each year, are enthralled and awed by the new worlds they find in National Parks such as Glacier and Yellows-tone- Though I've been going to those parks for 71 years now, I remain intrigued and amazed, HOWEVER, I'm also made nervous by what a few visitors do in their excitement. This year in Glacier I've seen a man take his little girl out on a big rock in McDonald Creek where one slip and they both would have perished in the rushing spring torrent. Several people each day stand or let their kids stand on the rock walls along Going to the Sun. That's how we've lost some visitors over the years, including a grandpa a few years back above the west side tunnel. Last Thursday there were a couple of people left the road to Many Glacier to get closer to a black bear and her cub down in Swiftcurrent Creek. A few minutes later I talked to a young woman and her son who were chasing a bighorn ewe and its lamb away from the bridge the sheep needed to cross. They wanted a picture. These incidents got me digging in past records of tourists at risk.

Two years ago Son Shannon and I took photos of a family walking right up to a herd of buffalo bulls near Nez Perce-Creek on the day there was a fatal goring at Old faithful. That same day we observed a group of photographers blocking off an angry big bull elk from his cows along The Firehole River.

Going back more in the files we find; A Texas gal was thwarted in her efforts to collect one and a half million dollars from the taxpayers when a Wyoming federal judge tossed out her claim of "negligence" against Yellowstone Park. The woman in question had her hide pierced by the horn of a buffalo when she failed to "observe wildlife at a distance", like it advises in the Park's brochure.

Another victim to suffer "injuries of ignorance" was a small boy visiting Yellowstone who was attacked and struck on the head by a front hoof of a cow moose. The youngster and his 10 year old brother tried to pet the cow's calf.

The boy was three and the Texas woman was 70. In 1986 I wrote of a man about 40 whom I watched sneaking up on an angry bull elk near Old Faithful, He escaped being killed by inches. Age does not limit foolishness.

That was the same day a Great Falls photographer was mauled and eaten by a grizzly he had stalked in a neighboring Yellowstone area. Like the photographer killed by grizzlies in Glacier at Elk Mountain, the Great Falls man was not a stranger to wildlife.

If you run into a silver haired busy body guy wearing a junior ranger badge and he tells you. "Gee, I wouldn't do that if I were you." … It might be me.