The golden years at Kintla Lake

There’s a 40-foot spruce tree tucked in the back of the Kintla Lake Ranger Station, swaying in the wind. When Lyle Ruterbories started as the ranger there, the tree was only waist high.

Ruterbories is 93. He’s been watching over Kintla Lake and its campground every summer for 22 years now. This may be his last summer, he hasn’t decided yet. He has a cranky knee now that hurts with every step. But whatever happens, it’s been a glorious career in a glorious place.

“Marge called it heaven on earth,” he said last week. “That’s the reason I come back. The people make it special.”

Marge is his late wife. For years they were a team — Lyle was the ranger, she was the campground host.

“She was my right arm,” he said.

But she passed away in the summer of 2005. It was difficult, but Lyle soldiered on. He lives in Wheatridge, Colo., most of the year, but Kintla may as well be home. The landscape and its many visitors are steeped in fond memories.

This summer season will be shorter than most. Ruterbories usually starts at Kintla in mid-May and stays until Oct. 1. But with federal budget cuts., he started in June this year and “they’re kicking me out Sept. 13.”

Ruterbories started the seasonal ranger job at the tender age of 70. He spent his career as a journeyman sheet metal worker. The army drafted him during World War II, but he was already married and had two kids so he never went overseas.

He spent part of his career working for Beech Aircraft and 33 years at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colo. The military background helped him land the National Park Service job at Kintla Lake.

He’s made a lot of improvements to the place over the years — cut down a multitude of stumps, put up a flag pole (with some help from rangers and Park staff), installed a wooden fence and moved the grease house, which stores fuel for boats, away from the lake. He also organized the motor camp, which had no numbered sites when he started.

The ranger station is a simple one-room cabin built in 1903 as a field office for an oil company. There was hope the area had oil, but it never panned out. The ranger station has a wood stove and a propane refrigerator.

Ruterbories used to patrol the backcountry, too. It was nothing to hike to the head of the seven-mile long lake and back, clearing trail and checking campers for permits.

He once hiked with ranger Charlie Logan from Kintla Lake to Boulder Pass and Brown Pass and down to Bowman Lake in a day. They left at 6 a.m. and were done by 5 p.m., including a close encounter with a grizzly at Boulder Pass.

At the time, Logan had just been reassigned to the area and wanted to get familiar with the trails and camps.

But the 22-mile long trek was brutal on his feet, and they were covered with blisters. The next year, the two were chatting with some friends, and one asked Logan if he wanted to go on another hike with Ruterbories.

“Heck no,” Logan joked. “Not until he slows down a bit.”

Ruterbories was more than 70 at the time.

Today the hikes are shorter, and backcountry rangers do most of the patrols.

“I’ve hiked every trail in the Park except for the Nyack Valley,” Ruterbories said.

One summer, Ruterbories had to run an impromptu taxi service by boat. A grizzly had killed a black bear on the lower Kintla Lake trail and another bear had closed the trail from Brown’s Pass.

That left people stuck in the backcountry at the head of Kintla Lake. So Lyle put up a sign informing hikers that he would make pickups back to civilization at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.

One night, the boat was full and he asked a party if they’d be willing to spend an extra night at the Lower Kintla Lake camp. One couple obliged and said it was the best and most quiet night they ever spent in Glacier Park. Ruterbories is still friends with the couple today.

It’s the people he’s met that made the job rewarding, Ruterbories said. He suspects it’s his ability to see people from their perspective that has helped with his own longevity.

“Any time I meet someone, I’m not my age, I’m their age,” he said.

He also never drank and never smoked.

“I don’t let anything worry me,” he said.