At alumni picnic, Anderson recalls escaping two forms of death on Sun Road
Roger Anderson at the Glacier National Park alumni picnic Sunday.
Back in 1953, Roger Anderson was one of the first avalanche spotters on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. He started his Park Service tenure on trail crew, but some of the early workers pulled road crew duty as well.
Anderson said he got pretty good at spotting avalanche conditions. One day, he and Claude Tesmer, who was plow foreman, were up at Oberlin Bend when the sun came out.
Sun was not a good thing.
“On the warmer days the snow got soft and it would start to slide,” Anderson said.
They looked skyward. Then heard it. Avalanches.
“That whole Garden Wall started to slide,” he said.
They thought they might have to spend the night up there, as the slides blocked the way.
But then a cloud went over the sun and that was their chance, Anderson explained. They went for it, ran down the Sun Road as fast as they could.
“We got caught between two active slides,” Anderson said.
On top of that, there was a grizzly bear in a chute. He had found a bighorn sheep carcass. He was just a few feet off the road and not too happy to see them, Anderson said.
“He was mad, but he wasn’t about to attack us,” he said. “He wanted that sheep.”
They were able to get by the bear and over the slide in front of them and safely out of there. After his Park tenure, Anderson went on to plow snow for the state of Montana at Marias Pass.
He was just one of many alumni who attended a reunion dinner Sunday at the Community Building in Glacier National Park to visit with fellow Park Service employees and to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.
Bruce Murphy was a trail crew foreman in Glacier from 1959 to 1966. But he was also trained in high mountain rescues by venerable ranger Bob Frauson. Once, a climber got stuck on some cliffs on Mount Gould.
Too scared to move, Murphy, Frauson and others headed up into the hills to save the man.
It got too dark and so they had to spend the night in just light clothing.
They huddled together and Murphy, to pass the time, regaled them with limericks, most of which were too salty for print, but here is one of the tamer ones:
There once was an Argentine named Bruno,
Who said, “Loving is one thing I do know,
While women are fine and sheep divine,
Llamas are numero uno!”
The next morning, the man was rescued without too much fuss. Murphy went on to get a doctorate and does reproductive biology research at the University of Montreal.
Jan Metzmaker was a member of the first female trail crew in 1973. She worked with three other women on trails, making $3.17 an hour. That might not seem like much, but the previous summer she was a maid at Lake McDonald Lodge and made $1 an hour, so the Park Service wages were great in comparison.
She said the worst part of the job was clipping and pulling thousands of young cedars that were crowding the Lake McDonald Trail.
She went on to become a water plant operator for the Park for several years after that.
That was a great job, she said, because she hiked to places like Sperry and Granite Park chalets on a regular basis to test their water supplies and, if need be, add chlorine to the systems.
She was pretty much on her own and no one ever knew where she was.
Sounds like the perfect park profession.
Metzmaker today lives in Whitefish.
About 120 people attended the reunion, swapping stories, eating dinner. Xanterra Parks and Resorts provided the Park Service birthday cake.