A wilderness original

Stu Sorensen remembers well his first job in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

“I was bear bait,” he said.

Sorensen was working for outfitter Russ Batche near Harrison Creek in the South Fork. A big old grizzly bear was making the rounds at various hunting camps back then, tearing the place up when hunters were gone. It was Sorensen’s job to stay behind and make sure this camp didn’t get touched.

“I slept with a flashlight and a .44,” Sorensen said.

The bear showed up, but Sorensen was able to scare it off without killing it.

The event is just one of many for Sorensen. His ties to the South Fork and the Bob Marshall go back to his childhood, and over the years he’s traveled nearly all the trails in the Bob and Glacier National Park as a professional packer, guide — or just for fun.

His father Fred worked for contractor Wixson and Crowe clearing land for the Hungry Horse Reservoir in 1948. The family lived in a one-room cabin at Riverside, even through the winter. Sorensen said he remembered his mother going down to the creek with a bucket and an ax, chopping a hole in the ice to get water.

The family canned everything to get through the winter — bear, venison, fish and potatoes. Sorensen got his first mule at the age 10. His dad traded a ’32 Ford Coupe straight across for it.

Those first trips, they hauled the mule by truck up the single-lane road to Spotted Bear and then traveled by foot up the river, fishing and camping as they went.

The mule carried most of their gear. The road was awful. The brush crowded it on either side, and the trees grew up through the median. In some places, it looked straight down to the river with no guardrail.

As an adult, Sorensen worked for outfitters in the wilderness and was a packer for Glacier Park for 11 years. Each summer, he’d log 600 to 800 miles packing supplies to lookouts, chalets and other cabins for the Park Service.

He recalled packing an entire steel building up Apgar Mountain once summer. All of the Park’s radio repeaters were in wooden buildings at the time, and no matter what the Park did, the pack rats kept chewing up the wiring. So they built a steel sided building to keep the rats out.

Sorensen also packed for the Forest Service and still does today.

Over the years, Sorensen has helped with a half-dozen or more Columbia Falls Boy Scout trips in the Bob. An Eagle Scout himself, Sorensen would run a pack string hauling supplies so the scouts and their leaders could hike with smaller packs. The groups traveled many miles — close to a 100 on a typical trip.

“When I did those trips, I tried to go to an area that I haven’t seen before,” he said. “The scouts realized the importance of survival training. They wouldn’t have the chance to go if we didn’t take them. It’s a life-changing experience.”

Sorensen was also one of the charter members of the Backcountry Horsemen of the Flathead. The group formed when the Forest was considering banning horses in the wilderness in 1973. In those early years, they packed out a lot of garbage from camps and miles of old telephone wire. Today the group helps with rehabilitating trails and other projects in the Bob. Garbage problems aren’t nearly as bad — most folks pack out what they pack in and practice leave no trace ethics.

For the past few years, Sorensen has been working on a 2,100 square-foot private museum at his home in rural Columbia Falls that will showcase late-19th and early-20th century life in the Bad Rock area. The project is nearly complete and includes artifacts and historical pieces that Sorensen has collected over the years. Each room has a theme — an old bar, a trapper’s cabin and a livery, to name a few.

But his true love is in the woods. He’s 69 now and has a well-worn map of the Bob Marshall. Each trail he’s been on is marked in red ink — the routes look like blood vessels spread across the paper, but a few trails remain that he hasn’t been on.

“I’m trying to see them all before I quit,” he said.