Seeing grizzlies

This week G. George Ostrom has selected a classic column from Oct. 18, 1968.

What happened the weekend of October 5th? Took my family up to our Moose City hideaway.

What a fabulous place up there with the Canadian wilderness to the north, Glacier’s most spectacular mountains to the east, the river, the meadows, beaver dams, creeks and the forest. We enjoy our Moose City jaunts ... but this time, it was even greater.

Where the Demers Ridge Trail hit the road, we saw something. They were walking up the road until they heard the car then they swung off to the left, and I felt disappointed at such a fleeting glance … but they came back on the road …this time coming toward us.

It was a sow and cub and what appeared to be a three-year-old. We were close now and they turned broadside with the morning sun flickering off those silver saddles …magnificent.

In what was probably an inadequate manner, I tried to impress my kids with the exclusiveness of what we had just observed and they seemed to understand that they might have just had their lifetime ration of grizzly observations. Clark, our 3-year-old, informed me he had seen hundreds of grizzlies before. I knew this was possibly a slight exaggeration.

Coming home Sunday afternoon, we used the new Camas Creek entrance, and right there in the big clearing was the most beautifully colored and biggest grizzly I’ve ever observed.

As if he somehow understood the audience he had encountered, he spurned the quick route to cover and lumbered across the highway right in front of the car … then stopped and posed broadside as we passed. Where were my three cameras with the up to 800-millimeter lens? In the trunk.

Less than 10 percent of Montana residents will see four live, wild grizzlies in their entire lives. We saw four in one weekend. Outside of that, nothing really exciting happened on our trip to Moose City.