Yesterdays: TV on Teakettle
School lunch, 1948.
70 years ago
Sept. 17, 1948
The Tally Lake Ranger District was selling 370,000 Christmas trees along Wild Bill Creek. The sale would require six miles of new road and the trees cost 25 cents a bale, which was five trees. The Forest Service was taking bids for 14 miles of the Spotted Bear Road (East Side Reservoir Road today) from Riverside Creek to Elk Park. The contract would beef up the existing road to accommodate heavy truck traffic.
60 years ago
Sept. 19, 1958
The Teakettle Television Association had requested a permit to begin building and testing a television translator on top of Teakettle Mountain. More than $8,000 in cash and pledges had been raised to fund the project, which would extend television signals in 20 miles in every direction from the summit. Former Glacier Park Chief Ranger Elmer Fladmark had been named the chief ranger of Yosemite National Park after a stint as superintendent of Joshua Tree National Monument. The Flathead National Forest would start leasing summer cabin lots near Heinrude Creek along the west side of the Hungry Horse Reservoir.
50 years ago
Sept. 20, 1968
Carl Daniels grew 1,000 pounds of Worba potatoes on his 40 by-16 foot garden near Columbia Falls. Crews were building 6.3 miles of new road up Bunker Creek on the Flathead National Forest as well as blasting rock for the Gordon Pass Trail. In addition, the plan was to extend the Spotted Bear River Road to within five miles of the wilderness boundary.
40 years ago
Sept. 21, 1978
Glacier Park superintendent Phil Iversen said the park’s efforts to reduce bear conflicts in Glacier were “paying off.” Glacier was closing trails that had frequent bear encounters with hikers, though it noted that only about 6 percent of the total miles of trail were closed in a single season. The Park had killed seven black bears for management reasons and no grizzlies.
30 years ago
Sept. 21, 1988
About 1.5 inches of rain fell over the past week, squashing the Red Bench Fire up the North Fork. The 38,500 acre blaze destroyed 22 dwellings or cabins and numerous outbuildings. It was the first major fire in the North Fork of the Flathead in decades. One firefighter, Patrick David, 26, of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, was killed and 10 others injured fighting the blaze. David died when a burning tree fell into a group a firefighters standing on the Red Meadow Creek Road.
20 years ago
Sept. 17, 1998
The Challenge Creek Fire was listed at 100 percent contained. The fire burned nearly 8,800 acres near Marias Pass. Teacher Gary Vinson recalled as a youth that he caught Roger Maris’s 50th home run. Vinson was 11 at the time and Maris hit the homer when the Yankees were in Los Angeles playing the Angels.
10 years ago
Sept. 18, 2008
U.S. Geological Survey scientist Kate Kendall released the findings of DNA grizzly bear study that determined there were about 765 grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Today, there’s an estimated 1,000 bears in the same landscape, which includes all of Glacier Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and millions of acres of other lands along the Continental Divide from Canada to Lincoln.