The colorful life of a park ranger

One night, former Glacier National Park ranger Charlie Logan got a phone call. There’d been a report of a man run over by a train not far from the Walton Ranger Station where Logan lived at the time.

The train tracks are outside of the Park, but Logan was the closest law enforcement to the scene and decided to check it out. In the dark, he first came across the man’s intestines. Then one leg, then another and then finally the man’s torso, sitting upright on its severed ribcage. The man had been drinking heavily and hopped the train only to fall between two cars.

Gruesome for sure, but people die in many different and unusual ways in the American West, and as a ranger for 30-plus years in Glacier and the Rocky Mountain national parks, Logan has seen a variety of tragedies over the years — and quite a few success stories as well.

There was the incident of the Base jumper (”Base” stands for buildings antennas, spans and earth) in 1997 who decided it would be a good idea to try to parachute off the north face of Glacier Park’s Mount Siyeh. The jumper made a mistake, however, and his parachute swung back into the 4,000-foot vertical rock face, hanging him by his chute just 300 feet down.

Logan flew up by helicopter with several other rangers. They rappelled down the face, rescued the man and “we were home for dinner by 8:15 p.m.,” he recalled. “That guy was really lucky.”

Logan, who is now retired from the Park Service, shared a few of his stories as part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation speaker series.

He started his career in the woods during his college years in 1966 as a Forest Service employee. A few years later, he got a job as a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park. He spent about half his career at Rocky Mountain and then came to Glacier Park in 1985. He noted wryly the role of a park ranger was to “protect the park from the people, the people from the park and the people from the people.”

He had various details over the years outside of both parks. He worked on the Exxon Valdez oil spill and once spent the night in the woods outside a cabin in Grand Teton National Park trying not to fall asleep — because inside the cabin then-President Jimmy Carter was snoozing himself.

Logan experienced a little Hollywood as well. He was the “incident commander” when the Saint Bernard dog movie “Beethoven II” was shot in Glacier Park. It was Logan’s job to make sure the production didn’t harm Park resources.

He was also in charge of evacuating Apgar during the Robert Fire in 2003. He had to make sure the Park emptied not once but twice that summer, as flames threatened the area.

“I got to evacuate the entire Lake McDonald Valley,” he said. “That was kind of unique.”

In 1999, he was part of a team that investigated the October theft of deer and animal mounts, computers and a polar bear rug from the Lake McDonald Lodge. The perpetrator was eventually caught but not until after he had sawed the antlers off the historic mounts and thrown the remains in a dump in Hungry Horse. The polar bear rug was later returned by a relative of the thief, who draped it over the hood of his pickup truck and said, “It looks like this is for you.”

Logan recalled an incident where a man was holed up in Glacier Park and had shot a maintenance worker who drove past on U.S. 2. The bullet didn’t strike the worker, but it prompted a manhunt. Logan said they found the man hiding in the woods.

As he approached within just a few yards, a ranger yelled for him to stop and get on the ground. Logan had a bead on the man with his shotgun. He noted it was the closest he ever came to shooting someone. It was later discovered the man was wanted for rape and murder in Illinois.

“You never know who you’re dealing with,” he said.

Logan’s career also included plenty of bear incidents, including the case of a photographer who got too close to a sow and her cubs on Elk Mountain. The man tried to climb a tree to get away, but the sow pulled him down and killed him. The man’s photos helped recreate the scene, and rangers determined from the his final photo that the bears were just 67 feet away — about six big steps for a grizzly.

The worst part about it was the bear actually tried to avoid the photographer, but he kept getting closer and closer. The sow finally had enough.

In another sad case, a sow grizzly killed a man on the Loop Trail near Granite Park Chalet. Logan credited a camper named Buck Wild for saving more lives, as he kept people from going down the trail. Wild also sent someone for help.

Rangers tried to recover the victim’s body but were initially unsuccessful as the bear kept moving it. Rangers eventually killed the sow and her cubs — she had a distinctive white collar of fur near her neck. Since then, there have been few incidents of people being charged or harassed by grizzlies in that area. Prior to that, it was common.

Logan credited his wife Sharon for his success. She often endured long lonely nights not knowing where he was or when he’d be back. The roasted chickens for dinner were heated and re-heated on occasion until they were “chicken jerky,” he said.

Logan is still working. He spends winters on ski patrol at Whitefish Mountain Resort and summers as a line medic at forest fires.