The Yenne Rocks

The history of Glacier National Park! The history of Flathead Lake and County! Yeah! The early days of our whole area are interwoven with the famous “Yenne Family.” Heaven know we media folks have covered the Yennes time and time again, including in this column. Seems like it is very often something happens to remind me of my old trail buddy, Bill. It happened again last week.

Let us have a short recall of my first big adventure with Bill Yenne. It must have been in the middle 1960s.

Bill was leading our pack string “Show-me trip” for two high-ranking National Park officials, plus Glacier’s Chief Ranger, and a local Flathead unelected troublemaker who worked on weekly newspaper columns. Yep, it was George Ostrom and he was along because Glacier leaders wanted to show him their side of park policies, which I had criticized.

Bill was leading us over the highest pass in the park, Boulder Pass, in a howling August snowstorm. In the bad visibility, I happened to notice a person hunched beside the poorly marked trail. She was in distress and I yelled for Bill to stop so we could talk to her.

It turns out, she was with a dozen university geology students from Wisconsin and they had become separated in the snow. Bill quickly figured out the main group had followed an old abandoned trail up in the rocks north of the current trail. He went up to find them and I remained with the girl for about half an hour until Bill came herding the others down. He gave direction that each person must keep the one in front in sight at all times while we headed down.

A mile below, we broke out of the snow near a beautiful little lake and Bill called a halt to check the health of our geology students and to get them warmed up with camp-fire coffee, which he prepared.

It didn’t take long for everyone to be feeling much better and conversation swung around to exploring Glacier Park. One of the students asked Ranger Bill if it was alright for them to pick up a few rock samples. That type of question was all it took for a typical Yenne story.

“Glad you asked about that. Several years ago, a nice lady from Philadelphia, or one of those big eastern seaports, was out here and took home a “pretty rock.” Later that winter, reading literature, she discovered it was illegal to take rocks out of a National Park. Being a Christian lady, she did the right thing and wrapped it up in some excelsior in a padded box and mailed it to headquarters.”

Things were very quiet there by that high mountain lake as Bill finished his story.

“Well, I kinda felt bad about my handling of that important assignment, but the fact is … in spite of how well I know this million-acre park, it took almost two years for me to figure out where that rock fit.”

All those gathered below Boulder Pass that day had a wonderful long laughing session and the legend of Bill Yenne had another fine chapter.

Prologue: This wonderful Yenne yarn came back to mind last week as I was digging through one of my treasure drawers. In there was a box with two small rocks, wrapped “in excelsior,” and then I remembered that after writing my original column about the “Yenne Rock,” people from around the country started mailing such momentos back to both Glacier headquarters and to me, personally.

This box I just found was mailed from Houston, Texas on November 9, 1984. All I ask now is, Please, do not mail me any more Glacier Park rocks. Secondly, forgive me for not finding where these last two fit.

G. George Ostrom is an award-winning columnist from Kalispell.