Glacier Guides celebrates its 35th summer

Over the years people have had numerous close calls in Glacier National Park. But Randy Gayner’s experience might just take the cake. Gayner just missed being washed away by a “tidal wave.”

Gayner was guiding a party in the Cut Bank drainage when they stopped to rest on the shores of scenic Pitamakan Lake. The shaded cliff side of the lake holds a large snowfield that clings to the rocks. As Gayner recalled it, a chunk of the snowfield the size of an apartment complex broke off and fell into the lake.

“We see this tidal wave coming across the lake,” he remembered.

Gayner quickly gathered the party and they made it to high ground as the water washed over the outlet and down the gully below. It then sucked back, and the creek briefly went dry before filling once again as the lake level sloshed back and forth like a giant bathtub.

Such can be the days as Glacier Park’s only professional guide service. This year Glacier Guides celebrates its 35th summer guiding clients in Glacier.

It had decidedly humble beginnings.

The year 1983 had a lot of parallels to today. Glacier National Park was seeing big crowds and a conservative president — Ronald Reagan — wanted to cut costs at the federal level.

Secretary of the Interior James Watt charged the Park Service with coming up with ways to privatize segments of the Service. So Gayner, Dave Ames and Mark O’Keefe put together a proposal to offer a backcountry guide service in the Park. Other parks had professional guide services, but Glacier did not.

O’Keefe and Gayner thought up the idea while trudging out of the Salmon River Country after a wild raft trip went south and the pair decided to hike out, rather than face more white-knuckle whitewater.

The three all had professional experience in the woods — Gayner and O’Keefe had both worked in Glacier as backcountry rangers. Ames was a hydrologist with the Helena National Forest and a writer. He crafted a six-page proposal for the Park Service and it was accepted.

That first year, they had about 30 clients total.

Cris Coughlin, who wasn’t a partner at the time, but still worked with the trio, recalled guiding a National Geographic crew to the summit of Mount Cleveland — Glacier’s highest peak — that first summer.

“That was my first gig,” she said. They ended up in a Nat Geo book — “Lakes, Peaks and Prairies.”

“It was a fun summer,” Gayner recalled. “But not very profitable.”

But they stuck with it. Gayner worked winters on Big Mountain ski patrol — something he still does today. The summer guiding business grew slowly. In 1987 the company bought Park River Rafting and that became Montana Raft Co. Two years after that they added fly fishing trips. Ames was bought out by John Gray in 1987. O’Keefe went onto state politics and was bought out by Coughlin, Gayner’s wife at the time. In 2004, Gray sold out to Denny Gignoux and two years ago, Coughlin sold her shares back to O’Keefe.

Ames went on to be a noted author. His best-known work is “A Good Life Wasted, Or 20 years as a Fly Fishing Guide.”

Machinations of leadership aside, the business grew and grew. Today, it employs more than 100, has a lodge in West Glacier, and offers fly fishing trips, guided day hikes and backcountry trips, and rafting. This year, it added bicycle tours on the Sun Road in the spring.

Gignoux’s addition was almost comical. He’d been a wolf researcher in the early 1990s and needed a job. While hanging out with some friends who worked there, he went along on some trips and helped out. They really didn’t need any more hands, but the affable Gignoux was hard to get rid of — he did a good job and was easy to get along with.

So they hired him.

There have been plenty of memorable journeys along the way, the partners noted.

Gignoux said his some of his most memorable backcountry journeys were in his youth, when his father, Tom, was doing research on Sperry Glacier for the University of Montana, boring through its ice to test core samples for pollution from the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co.

Denny tagged along on those journeys. He was 7 years old. They camped below Sperry Chalet (back then, the campground was at the creek below the chalet) and hiked up to the Glacier every day. His father had a BMW motorcycle and they rode up to Glacier, Denny in a sidecar.

Gray said there were many memorable hikes over the years, but one that sticks with him was when a grizzly bear grabbed a mountain goat above the trail and flung it over the ledge near Cut Bank Pass.

“This is as far as we’re going,” Gray told his party as the grizzly dropped down to retrieve its meal.

Ames had a mountain goat tale of his own. He was at Gunsight Pass, guiding a British film crew, when a wolverine, not more than 50 feet away, grabbed a goat. The film crew missed the attack by just a couple of minutes as the wolverine hauled the goat away.

Ames also recalled a scene in the first year when he witnessed a cow elk drop a calf. The placenta was still attached to the calf and a coyote tried to attack it. Two other cow elk helped the mother fend off the coyote, forming a circle around the calf and lashing out with vicious kicks until the coyote left with an injured leg.

The first year the Park allowed them to live in the complex that is now the Glacier Institute Field camp in Apgar.

Ames recalled writing stories on a typewriter with the fingers cut out of his gloves — the cabins had no heat.

“Those months living in Glacier were astonishing,” he said.

For O’Keefe, a memorable hike came more recently, when he took the cast of MTV’s “Made” into the Park. This particular show was about two twin sisters who had never spent a day apart in their lives, spending their first night alone in Glacier.

The two parties even crossed paths, without knowing they were close.

When the sisters reunited, their pure joy was memorable, O’Keefe said.

Coughlin recalled an excursion in the 1980s when she guided a pair of young boys from Chicago across the park on a multi-day trip. Pete Metzmaker, who is a schoolteacher at Whitefish today, was along for part of it as he was training to be a guide, but then he had to leave.

The boys wanted Metzmaker to stay. But Coughlin made the rest of the trip memorable for the boys — they saw elk and grizzlies and a host of other wildlife.

A few years later a man from Chicago showed up for a return trip. They set him up with one of their more adventurous male guides, Coughlin said. But the young man remembered Coughlin from years before.

“Can she go with us?” he asked.

What’s it take to be a good guide?

“It involves enjoying people, patience and willingness to learn constantly,” Gignoux said.