Longtime ranger reflects on a storied career

Dave Shea will be remembered as a shining example of what it means to be a ranger in Glacier National Park.

“I’d kind of like to think of myself as a wilderness ranger, a wildlife biologist and an educator,” he said in a recent interview.

Most notably Shea spent 11 years as the seasonal ranger at the Belly River Ranger Station in the park, along with his wife Genevieve, from the mid-1970s into the 1980s.

All told, he was a seasonal ranger in Glacier for 36 years. (He also was a biologist for the Forest Service for several years) He retired from Glacier in 2001.

He said his years in the Belly River, were certainly the most special and to this day, he still regrets leaving the backcountry post in the remote northeast corner of the park.

The couple would get to the ranger station in April, “even before you could get the horses in sometimes,” due to snow and leave in October.

There were numerous bear, mountain lion, elk and other wildlife sightings and encounters over the years.

One day Genevieve was doing dishes when a wolverine walked by the ranger station just outside the window.

“How many people can say they’ve seen that?”

Shea remarked.

There was also a memorable elk encounter at the station’s horse pasture, which has a jack leg fence to keep the horses in. One time on side of the valley there was a bull elk that had 16 cows and the other there was a bull with six cows. They met at the pasture and rather than fight each other, they started tearing into the fence poles, tossing them about.

“I finally had to scare them off, they were tearing the fence down,” he said.

All told Shea figures he saw 16 mountain lions in the field (they’d sometimes hang close to a mineral lick close to the station) as well as hundreds of bears and a dozen wolverines.

Back then wolves were far less common on Glacier, though they would wander through.

Inevitably, he noted, they’d get killed in Canada (the ranger station is just a few miles from the border).

Today the life of a wolf is still precarious outside the boundaries of the Glacier due to hunting, trapping, and high-speed traffic, but they are more common than back then.

Shea also recalled the once famous “CosleyTrees” in the Belly River.

They were aspens that early park ranger (and notorious poacher) Joe Cosley had carved his name into. Shea said there were two still alive in the Belly River when he was ranger there. One was near Cosley Lake and another near the ranger station. He said he cut one down because it was going to fall down anyway.

The last he knew, the portions of the carved trees were still at the ranger station.

He started out his career as a fire guard under ranger Ed Olmstead in 1966.

Shea has had some unenviable tasks in Glacier.

In 1967, he was summoned to be part of a team of rangers charged with shooting grizzlies at Granite Park chalet after the infamous Night of Grizzlies, where two women were mauled and killed by bears the same night. One woman was killed at the campground near Granite Park chalet and another at Trout Lake by separate food-conditioned bears.

Shea joined three park biologists and another seasonal ranger at Granite Park, armed with .300 Winchester Magnums.

Within 12 minutes the first night, the men killed two grizzlies at the chalet’s garbage dump.

The next night a sow came to the dump, leaving her cubs behind. After shooting the bear, the men found dried human blood on its claws. A fourth grizzly was killed near Trout Lake.

“I didn’t like killing those bears,” Shea said in a 2002 interview with the Hungry Horse News. “The chalet had an outdoor dump. That was the problem. It attracted bears.”

After the incident, the Park Service made significant changes in the way wilderness camping was run in park, including education of how to deal with grizzlies, but more importantly, how to safely and properly store food in the backcountry so bears couldn’t get at it.

They also closed dumps and instituted a wilderness camping permit system to track and manage backcountry use, which is still used today.

At 84, Shea still finds himself hitting the trails and teaching classes for several conservation organizations. He spent 40 years teaching classes for the Glacier Institute and just recently retired from that role.

Shea has authored a few books, including a book of life-sized animal tracks of most of the creatures in the park. It’s a great reference tool for any wildlife enthusiast. In addition, he did a small book on Chief Mountain.

Shea grew up in Red Wing, Minnesota next to the Mississippi River.

After high school he joined the Army in 1961 as achieved the rank of Sergeant in the Signal Corps. He noted his service was squeezed in between the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

He then got a bachelor’s degree at the University of Montana in biology, and later, a master’s degree in wildlife biology in and resource conservation in 1973 from UM. For his thesis, he worked with renowned biologist Riley McClelland on bald eagle studies in and around Glacier, capturing and banding more than 300 birds.

At the end of his career for the Park Service he was part of a three-year grassland study that examined the health of backcountry meadows across the park.

He taught thousands of people over the years, including teaching students at John Hopkins University.

He still teaches to this day, leading classes for the Audubon Society, the Montana Wilderness Association, the Montana Native Plant Society and for the Old Trail Museum in Choteau, where he lives today.

Recently he thought they’d have to leave Montana permanently to take care of family matters in Minnesota, but now they are returning to Choteau soon, he said, and they’re happy to be back in Montana.