The Legacy of a Grizzly

By Graham Coppes, 9-05-08

	Click here or on the image above for a full slideshow of images, including clips of newspaper articles, Park Service reports and images of Mike Coppes right after the mauling. NOTE: This slideshow contains graphic material. When Mike Coppes visited his son Graham two summers ago, it marked his first trip back to Glacier since that fateful day in 1975. After some discussion, father and son agreed that the trip provided the perfect opportunity to complete the hike Mike had started more than 30 years ago.

Even in a region as rugged as Western Montana, where towering peaks are commonplace, the summits of Glacier Park are mind boggling. I first learned of this country as an impressionable child, seated around a fireplace, while my father regaled open-eyed company with a story from his short, but powerful history with the place I now call home.

If our lives are given meaning by those we love, then they too, are our impetus for inspiration. After 18 years of childhood surrounded by a vast sea of corn, I followed my father’s influence and his stories, to Montana.

Maybe our lives, aspirations and dreams are merely an extension of our parents’ journey.  So, if it was the will of a wild grizzly that my father continue living, in some ways, I too owe my existence to this creature.

In September of 1975 my dad, Mike Coppes, was working as a guide for Cartan Tours taking customers on two-week long voyages through the northern Rockies.  He would pick people up in Great Falls, drive them to East Glacier, spend a week hopping around the park, eventually continuing north to Banff.  It was in this schedule one day that my father came to meet Martin, a fellow Indiana native working at the front desk of Glacier Park Lodge. 

They both had the next day free. And so the two strangers made plans to hike into the backcountry.  When day broke, they caught a ride south to Two Medicine Lake and ventured into the woods toward Rockwell Falls.  About six miles out, conversation dwindled under the roar of the falls. 

The memory of the next switchback has stayed with my father forever. 

Two bears comfortably dining on a buffet of berries came sharply into focus as Martin slammed into my father. The grizzlies spotted the two hikers and took flight toward them, thundering down the trail with a fluidity and force of movement that can only be seen, not described. 

My father, struggling to grasp the scene unfolding before him, fell prey to his own instincts, running to the nearest tree.

He recalls his attempt at flight as an exercise in futility.  The towering bear ripped him from the tree, delivering him into a world of chance, a place where luck plays a far greater role in survival than any amount of calm or preparation. 

To attempt to appreciate the next few minutes of his life is somewhat impossible. My father describes a gaping jaw swallowing his left boot.  He says he understands how a stuffed animal feels when being played with by a happy dog.  He remembers the imposing face and claws of an aggressor that barely left him alive.  He explains this in his own words from a memoir he wrote soon after the incident:

“while I tried vainly to climb that tree, this great ruler of the Rockies reached me with a ferocious growl.  He grabbed my leg, ripping flesh and cloth as he pulled me to the ground, putting his huge body over mine.  It had been about ten seconds since the bear had appeared.  Showing a ferocity I’ve never known, the bear attacked me with snarled teeth.  My deathly screams pierced my own ears with an unbelievable fright.  The grizzly bared his huge yellow fangs, tearing at my Levi’s from his position above my lower body.  He attacked incessantly, twisting his mammoth light brown head and growling constantly as he lunged forward.  His caved in forehead and dark, deep-set eyes will never leave my memory.”

The bears left as quickly as the hikers found them.  Martin had been able to find protection in a tree, temporarily escaping the terror my father endured.  But as he yelled down from the safety of the tree, Martin’s voice drove the bear into another attack. 

The same bear that left my father for dead now charged Martin’s arboreal post.  Although my father saw nothing, he listened in horror to the now familiar sounds of mauling.  Frozen with fear and immobilized by serious injuries, my father could do nothing but cower in the bushes with a very real understanding of Martin’s struggle for life. 

The bear again retreated, leaving my father and Martin to fight for their lives in the great Montana wilderness.

As the shock faded, the two hikers began to understand the limits of their choices.  It became clear the only option was to make their way back down the trail.  My father explains the moments following the attacks in his memoir.  He writes:

“It was apparent that we had to leave quickly, because the bears might return to torment us … Still terrified, we began to walk, shouting all the way for the bears to stay away.  The same pathway that moments before had been a magnificent and joy filled hiking trail for us now became a long and treacherous road to safety.  Through my shredded pants, I could see several lacerations, though I didn’t know how bad.  We simply knew we couldn’t stop walking till we got to the lake, so we tried to ignore the severity of our injuries.  When the pathway steepened we just toughened up and climbed.  To help encourage Martin, we held hands the entire trip down the trail.”

Six long miles down the trail and several hours later, the Blackfeet Indian hospital in Browning took my father in.  As the story unfolded, and eager park rangers filled their bureaucratic forms, several details came to light, including the hikers’ description of one of the bears. Both my father and Martin were adamant that the second bear was white.  The rangers said the bear was most likely blond or silver, but the disbelief has never swayed their accounts.  In Blackfeet culture, this was a theologic story of epic proportions. To Blackfeet, the white bear represents a direct manifestation of God in the flesh.  It was the community’s profound belief that my father had been directly touched by the hand of God. 

As a child, I begged my father to tell me this story over and over, asking him with annoying repetition if there was anything else he could tell me.  Most fathers have the ability to enchant their children with bedtime stories and heroic tales of their youths, but this was different. 

As I grew older and developed greater understanding of the incident, certain household details began to have a new importance and ultimately, lead to a greater understanding of my father. 

Maybe it was the library shelves filled with books on grizzlies.  Or perhaps it was the mystic symbols of bears present on the bathroom counters, office desks, closet nooks and bedside tables of my childhood home. For my father, each of these pieces served as a memory, a salutation to something higher, and a physical representation of a power that touched his life. 

For me, each of these small memories has come together, to help shape my passion for wild places and ultimately, the direction I am trying to take my life. 

I have come to believe that wilderness is intrinsically essential in the success of human society and few places better represent our successful preservation of nature, than the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.  This personal ideology was fostered and founded in the stories of my father and his experience with the “great bear.”

I am now a Montana Grizzly.  A “Griz Card” rests in my pocket and a Grizzlies hat sits on my head.  The irony often strikes me, but not my father.

When I first moved to Montana, my father told me he saw no coincidence in the new life I chose.  He says it was destiny that brought me here and as his son, it was only fitting I become a Montana Grizzly.  It is through his interpretation that I have come to appreciate the connection our lives share. 

It wasn’t until a trip together last summer that it all became tangible.  To my mother’s initial dismay, I have spent my college summers working in West Glacier as a river guide.  I can understand her concern, but how could I resist the temptation of paradise filled with peaks, where the soil holds my father’s blood.  I had to go. 

My mother’s only experience with Glacier is completely consumed by her husband’s near death.  Perhaps she never took the time to fully understand what had happened and why.  She saw Glacier simply as a wild place where people shouldn’t push the natural limitations of an untamed land.  Thus, it was a completely unacceptable place of employment for her only son. 

Previously this argument dismantled a family vacation my father had planned to Glacier Park. We didn’t go, and my father would wait another decade before he returned, this time with his son.

On the summer days I have to myself, I travel through the remote places of these magical hills, only building a connection with my father’s time here through my own adventures in Glacier. As boys from Indiana, we share a similar awe of this landscape.  These mountains have provided me with a sense of wonder yet to be equaled in my life.

When he came to visit me two summers ago, it was his first trip back to Glacier since that fateful fall day in 1975.

At first, the significance of the trip was lost on me. To the reader it might appear painfully clear, but at the time, my self-righteous and zealous pursuit of youthful independence conquered most other emotional thought.  But when he arrived at Glacier International Airport, I quickly realized that this place held equal importance to both of us. 

As we left West Glacier, the summer sun filled the car with a quiet satisfaction.  The gigantic landscape flew by in an eastward blur as we cruised down Highway 2.  My father wanted to visit Glacier Park Lodge and the small, summertime metropolis of East Glacier. After some discussion, we agreed that the trip provided the perfect opportunity to flirt with both history and destiny. 

The two of us, both deviously similar, saw our time together here as an exclamation point at the end of a very long sentence.  It was the completion of a great journey for my father.  To return, with his son at his side, to this place of such youthful significance provided an incomparable sense of conclusion.  So, when we discussed the idea of hiking the trail around Two Medicine Lake and up towards Rockwell Falls, my father did not hesitate.

For anyone who has spent much time in the woods of the Northern Rockies, the sights, sounds, smells and feelings are evocative.  Yet, for my father, these sensations had been stored away, deep within his subconscious.  Within minutes of passing the trailhead, his head began to twist about with a sense of curiosity and excitement usually reserved for small children.  I have rarely seen my father exhibit such enthusiasm, and eager exploration. 

The clouds swirled around the sun, creating a montage of dancing shadows along the forest floor.  For him, I assume it was a very similar afternoon, in the exact same place, on a different day in history.  The moment seemed to take him over.  As we hiked further along the trail, sun-drenched smiles transitioned into an eerie sense of rediscovery.  I could almost hear his synapses firing, shocking lost memories into place and time.

The exact location where my father’s life had been challenged never became completely clear.  Yet, the two of us walked side by side through a forest cloaked in destiny, talking as lost memories bubbled to the surface of his understanding.  As we neared the trailhead again, a sense of achievement provided a sense of success only understood when marred by a history of failure.  It was a day not soon to be forgotten.

That week I spent with my father will forever serve as a connection between his life and mine.  It was the acknowledgement of sharing more than a common lineage.  History had collided with the present and for that one beautiful week, the two of us reveled in the paths our lives shared. 

I realize now that so many of my dreams have been made possible by my parents.  In some ways, it seems that their dreams have died so mine could live.  It was their sacrifice that provided for my free-ranging, peak-bagging, trout-filled, Montana lifestyle.  Maybe this is the natural progression. This concession represents their great sacrifice and at the same time, the ultimate gift. 

It is, perhaps, this transition of dreams, this willing exchange of life blessings, that fully embodies the interconnected journey of parent and child, or in this case, father and son. 

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