Yesterdays: Trail crew working on cable over river to Nyack Ranger Station

70 years ago

April 18, 1952

Glacier Park trail crews were starting their season and one of the first jobs was to repair the cable car that went over the Middle Fork of the Flathead to the Nyack Ranger Station. High water was expected to damage the footings. The ranger station today is abandoned, but some of the old buildings still remain. The cable has long been removed.

60 years ago

April 20, 1962

Glacier National Park would see Mission 66 improvements, with a new administration building off the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Mission 66 was a program to spruce up National Parks by 1966 as they were seeing increased tourism. At the time, Glacier was seeing about 760,000 visitors annually. Also on tap was initial clearing for what is now the Camas Road.

50 years ago

April 21, 1972

Columbia Falls High School had a new hair code. No mustaches or beards were allowed and a boy’s hair could be no lower than a “normally collared shirt.” Though hair could extend down to the mid ear region, where it had to be above the ear previously.

40 years ago

April 22, 1982

Glacier Park was hiring 292 seasonal employees, which was down a little bit from the previous year. Montana Sen. Max Baucus was proposing a joint Waterton-Glacier entrance pass as part of the 50th anniversary of the peace park.

30 years ago

April 23, 1992

Glacier Park saw its lightest snowpack in years, though an avalanche still managed to tear about 44 feet of wall off the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Lion hunter Mike Clanton tracked down and shot a lion that had stashed a deer under a truck at a rural Columbia Falls home.

20 years ago

April 18, 2002

Brittany Murphy was named Columbia Falls Junior Miss. Vandals went on a rampage at the high school and destroyed the bleachers at the soccer fields and broke windows out of school buses, among other things.

10 years ago

April 18, 2012

The Columbia Falls girls softball team beat Polson for the first time ever, 8-3.