Notes from Ranger Doug

I’ve had the pleasure over the years of getting correspondence from longtime Glacier National Park ranger/naturalist Doug Follett. He would either mail or drop by poems and notes to the office.

I had a couple of them hanging up for years and I’m sharing some of his notes here. I also had the pleasure of going on a few of his guided hikes and boat tours over the years.  He told me a story that when he first started, he was giving tours at Logan Pass and didn’t know his flowers very well.

When asked, “What kind of flower is that?”

He gave the same pat answer. “Glacier lilies.”

Of course, the lilies had long since expired and whatever they were looking at was not a lily, but most didn’t know, until one day someone did.

“That most certainly is not a glacier lily!” the person exclaimed.

That’s when he decided to brush up on his flower identification, he said.

Doug always had a story to tell and even if you’d heard it before he made it entertaining, even the second or third time around. 

But make no mistake, he did really know his stuff. On one talk about wildfire he pointed out that the landscape first covers up with lodgepole pine trees to hold the soils after a fire. I never thought of it that way, but sure enough, that’s how it usually happens, at least in Northwest Montana.

Eventually, the lodgepole either die out or burn again, though not as severely. This natural thinning then results in the more open woods we come to enjoy. It just takes decades to get there. The Howe Ridge Fire in Glacier National Park is a perfect example of this.

But I digress. I will miss Doug’s voice when I stop by the visitor center. Today, the longtime Glacier Park employees are fewer and fewer between and we’re not making it any easier to make a career out of educating the public. 

Still, there’s a lot of good people wearing the green and the gray and having called dispatch a time or two about a member of the public flouting the laws of the park, I’ve been impressed by the dedication of the rangers and staff to follow up on a call.

I still have hope there’s another Doug Follett waiting in the wings, even in the current climate.