Wednesday conversations: Ivan O'Neil

When Ivan O’Neil was in his mid-teens he lied about his age to work for the Forest Service. He was 15 years old in 1944, but there was a war on and so they hired him to be a fire lookout on Pioneer Ridge in the South Fork of the Flathead. He spent the summer up there, spotting fires and even putting a few out.

In those days, that’s what lookouts did. There was no calling in a crew if it wasn’t needed.

His best friend, George Ostrom, who would go on to be the Flathead Valley’s premier radio news broadcaster, was across the way, on Battery Mountain in another lookout.

O’Neil worked for the Forest Service for three summers. The hitches in the lookouts spanned six weeks straight.

“We got to come down on V-J Day in 1945,” he recalled during an interview last week. He graduated from Flathead High School in 1946.

In those formative years, O’Neil said he considered a career with the Forest Service, even started studying forestry when he first went to college at the University of Montana. But he changed his mind and switched to business and accounting. After college he went into the Army. He wanted to go in sooner, but while he was gopher hunting as a young boy, someone shot him in the lung accidentally. The person was never found, and doctors couldn’t remove the bullet — it’s still in his lung today. So the Army wouldn’t take him, at least at first.

So O’Neil got his education, was an auditor in the Army and when he returned to Kalispell he started a business with a cousin who was a cabinet maker. O’Neil started a lumber yard. The cousin built cabinets. They called it Western Woodworking and Supply. O’Neil bought another lumber yard in Columbia Falls.

The business changed names to a long familiar one in the Flathead Valley — Western Building Center. Today WBC still has a stores in Kalispell and Columbia Falls, and eight other locations — Whitefish, Eureka, Libby, Polson, Ronan, Stevensville and Culbertson and Evergreen.

In the age of Lowe’s and Home Depot and a host of other competition, the business still thrives today, offering excellent customer service and catering to contractors.

“Eighty percent of our business is to contractors,” he said.

But O’Neil is probably better known to Hungry Horse News readers for his adventures with Ostrom in Glacier National Park as a founding member of the Thursday hiking group, the Over-the-Hill Gang.

It wasn’t always called that, O’Neil recalled. Back in 1976 a group of Kalispell businessmen, attorney Ambrose Measure, theater owner Spencer Ryder, ophthalmologist Hi Gibson, and O’Neil started hiking together in Glacier National Park on Thursdays.

Ostrom joined in about a year later, O’Neil recalled. It was Ostrom, he said, who started calling the group The Over-The-Hill Gang.

“The Thursday hiking group was a little too formal for me,” Ostrom said.

The group grew progressively larger as the years went on. Ostrom told of the group’s exploits on his radio broadcast and in columns in the Hungry Horse News. Then editor Brian Kennedy began writing about the group as well. On a nice summer day, the group still has about 40 informal members who hike together, though they generally split up into smaller groups and go different places.

Over the years, O’Neil hiked thousands of miles with Ostrom and the gang, many with friend Walter Bahr.

O’Neil has also climbed 125 peaks in the park. He said he’s hiked about 75 percent of the trails, but many of the Gang’s exploits are off-trail excursions.

One particularly long day they went up the Iceberg Notch in Many Glacier, a virtually vertical climb, over Ahern Pass, climbed Ahern Peak and then went down the Highline Trail to Swiftcurrent Pass and back to Many Glacier.

“It started raining pretty hard, so we didn’t want to go back down the notch,” he recalled. “I think that was about 26 miles.”

It took three attempts to climb Mount Cleveland, Glacier’s tallest peak. One time, Gibson got them lost in the woods. The second there was a snowstorm and the third they made it.

They even lost a companion. Harry Isch, an accountant and longtime friend, died of a heart attack on an excursion to climb Mount Cannon near Logan Pass. There have been a few close encounters with bears, though he said the only time he ever had his bear spray out of his holster was in Yellowstone, as he hiked through a herd of bison.

There have been hairy moments — cliffs that fell off to nowhere. The east face of Mount Clements has cliffs like that.

“I said I’d never do it again, but then I did,” he said.

Cracker Peak had a similar experience.

“I didn’t know if I could make it across. It was 3,000 feet down to the lake,” he said.

One of his favorite hikes is the Floral Park traverse, which goes primarily off trail from Logan Pass to Sperry Chalet and then down to Lake McDonald Lodge.

Perhaps most importantly, the adventures were all worthwhile, even the miserable days.

“I can’t think of any I regret going on,” he said.

Today O’Neil is legally blind, but he still gets out. He uses walking sticks and a good hike is about 10 miles, not bad for an 88-year-old hiker.

His advice is simple to the uninitiated

“Just get out and hike and don’t be afraid to get off trail,” he said.