Montana: Glacier Park Issue

Readers, tourists, hikers, and climbers who are fans of Glacier National Park will enjoy the Summer 2010 centennial issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History beginning with the John Fery painting on the cover.

The issue not only contains a great overview of the park, but includes dozens of photographs and paintings in support of the text. Read it for the information, then keep it as a collector’s item.

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

“Conceiving Nature: THE CREATION OF MONTANA’S GLACIER NATIONAL PARK” by Andrew C. Harper

“Where the Prairie Ends and the Sky Begins: MAYNARD DIXON IN MONTANA” by Donald J. Hagerty

“Glacier National Park: PEOPLE, A PLAYGROUND, AND A PARK” by
Jennifer Bottomly-O’ looney and Deirdre Shaw

“The Miraculous Survival of the Art of Glacier National Park” by Hipólito Rafael Chacón

Cover Art: “The iconic mountain goat on the front cover is a detail from a painting by John Fery, one of the park’s foremost painters. Fery made it the centerpiece of his untitled collage of Glacier views (n.d., oil on canvas, 65″ x 115″) commissioned by the Great Northern Railway.”

Congratulations to the editors, writers and photographers on a wonderful commemorative issue.

Malcolm

Available in multiple e-book formats for only $5.99

Many Glacier Hotel to Operate at Half Capacity in 2011

Many Glacier Hotel

The next phase of a long-term rehabilitation project for Glacier National Park’s Many Glacier Hotel in Montana will begin just after this summer’s tourist season ends in September.

The upcoming $9,531,200 restoration project phase addresses interior renovation work in the northern half of the hotel. This includes 50 percent of the guest rooms, dining room, Interlaken Lounge, rmployee fining room as well as other employee and maintenance areas.

“The components are being combined to compress the timeline for the work, reduce cost and minimize impact to hotel guests and the public,” said Park Superintendent Chas Cartwright.

Cartwright added that half the guestrooms will be closed during the 2011 summer season as well as the main dining room. Meals will be served in the nearby, but considerable smaller, Swiss Lounge.

According to the National Park Service, the restoration of lost historic elements is not funded as part of this project, where surfaces and fixtures (walls, floors, lighting, etc.) are to be removed for Life/Safety repairs and rehabilitation work, replacement surfaces and fixtures will include historically-compatible surfaces and fixtures.

Part of a multiphase hotel rehabilitation plant, the work focuses on correcting life safety and seismic issues identified in earlier assessments of the 1915 structure build by the Great Northern Railway. Funding comes from $15.6 million of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus allocations.

Earlier phases of the Many Glacier Hotel rehabilitation completed in 2005 focused on structural stabilization and the building’s exterior which had been impacted by harsh environmental conditions over time. The National Park Service has requested additional funding in 2013 and 2014 for the remaining guest rooms, lobby, south bridge, annex and lower level meeting rooms.

In 1995, Patricia Leigh Brown wrote in he New York Times (“American’s Crumbling Parkitecture”) that “the price The price tag on the Many Glacier Hotel, which opened in 1915 as the stoic showpiece of the ‘American Alps,’ is estimated at around $45 million, a figure that is “almost 50 percent of the entire U.S. National Park Service construction budget,” said Dave Mihalic, Glacier’s superintendent at the time.

Brown added that while Americans think of the national parks as wilderness areas, over half them revolve around cultural landmarks such as the hotel. In addition to time and the elements, restoration and rehabilitation at many park sites have fallen short at a time when Congress is creating new parks and visitation is soaring, but budgets are falling short of need, leading to large shortfalls for historic preservation.

In 1996, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Many Glacier Hotel on it’s “11 Most Endangered list” of threatened historic buildings. According to the National Trust, “Tight budgets, increasing demands on park staff and changing priorities have resulted in little or no maintenance of historic structures. As a result, the sites are left to rot, become safety hazards, are then closed to the public and eventually lost entirely.”

The park’s 1999 General Management Plan viewed Many Glacier Hotel and the Granite Park and Sperry Chalets as high priorities. Their preservation has become part of $750 in federal stimulus money for 800 projects. $17 million has been earmarked for Glacier National Park.

–Malcolm

Each purchase benefits Glacier National Park

Glacier Centennial: Green Business Program

from NPS Glacier…

The National Parks Conservation Association has teamed up with the Centennial Program to launch a Green Business Program. This program will empower local businesses to reduce their environmental impact, resulting in a more efficient and sustainable means of doing business.

Through collective action, Glacier Centennial Green Businesses will help to reduce the environmental impact on our region; decrease the amount of unnecessary waste that goes into our landfill, reduce energy use, conserve water, and foster a healthy local economy by supporting local businesses.

Mark your calendars! Join us for several Green Business Activities on April 20-22, 2010. Stay tuned for more information.

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Click here for more information and a PDF application form. Even if you’re not applying, the form itself has a lot of valuable tips and links.

–Malcolm

Glacier Centennial: Caroline Lockhart

Newspaper reporter, bestselling novelist and rancher Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962) was probably the first woman to go over Glacier National Park’s Swiftcurrent Pass. Working for a Philadelphia newspaper under the pseudonym “Suzette,” she came to Altyn, Montana in 1901 and spent the rest of her life in the West.

At the time, Altyn was a boisterous mining boom town in the Swiftcurrent Valley in present-day Glacier National Park, a town its promoters said would soon become the rich center for gold, silver, copper and even oil. (See my essay about Altyn and the Swiftcurrent Valley in the upcoming “Nature’s Gifts” anthology to be released in March.)

In Cowboy Girl, an excellent biography of Caroline Lockhart, John Clayton writes that “Suzette’s arrival represented major news for Altyn, which had been born less than three years previously, when a strip of land was taken from the Blackfeet Indians and thrown open to mining. Altyn’s prospectors believed that within a few years its destiny would be decided: ‘the richest and biggest camp on earth or nothing.’”

By all accounts, Lockhart was ornery, strong-minded, strong-willed, and outspoken. (She called novelist Zane Grey a “tooth-pulling ass!”) Some suggest that her liberated personality kept Lockhart and her novels–several of which were made into movies–from being better known over the long term. Her novels include Me-Smith, Lady Doc, The Man from Bitter Roots, and The Fighting Shepherdess.

Lockhart owned a newspaper in Cody, Wyoming, where she also served as the first president of the Cody Stampede. Her fight against prohibition would keep Lockhart and her paper in the public’s often-angry eye. Even though she came west as a Phildelphia “Bulletin” reporter, she had grown up on a ranch; she found her dream again when she bought a ranch at Dryhead, Montana near the Pryor Mountains. She increased the size of the ranch and became, in her mind, a true cattle queen. The ranch is now owned by the National Park Service as part of the Bighorn Canyon Recreation Area.

In his article “Project Slows Decay at Lockhart Ranch,” Clayton addressed challenges of restoration–historical authenticity vs. practicality–when he noted that “the research also provides delicious evidence of how characters of the past dealt with hardships. For example, Lockhart had an old-style plank floor in her kitchen. She liked the look of it, but mice could easily creep through its gaps. So she kept two bullsnakes in the house to kill the mice. Today, by contrast, the Park Service uses gravel fill beneath the planks to keep out the rodents.”

Lockhart came west via the Great Northern Railway looking for adventure. By all accounts she not only found it but became a part of it. According to a the National Park Service’s Caroline Lockhart page, the aging liberated lady wrote, “There are no old timers left anymore. I feel like the last leaf on the tree.”

Copyright (c) 2010 by Malcolm R. Campbell, author of two novels, “The Sun Singer” (set in Glacier Park) and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire” (set in an imaginary Texas town).

Glacier Centennial: Grace Flandrau

GNRR Booklet

“It is due to the discovery made by John F. Stevens in 1889 that four years later the evil spirit of the Blackfeet fled forever from Marias Pass before the onrush of a transcontinental express. A continuous highway of steel at last connected, by the straightest and lowest route, the headwaters of the Mississippi with Puget Sound.” — Grace Fandrau, “The Story of Marias Pass,” 1925

Author Grace Flandrau (1886-1971) was a journalist between the 1920s and 1940s who received high acclaim for her short stories and novels. Her novel “Being Respectable” is, perhaps, her best known.

At the time when the Great Northern Railway was seeking popular writers such as Mary Roberts Rinehart to help promote the wild country of Glacier National Park, they selected Flandrau to write a 24-page booklet about Montana’s Marias Pass.

1940s GN Ad

Rail travelers on today’s AMTRAK Empire Builder, named for the famed Great Northern train of an earlier era, see Marias Pass as the train traverses the Continental Divide south of Glacier National Park. U.S. Highway 2 also uses the pass.

Flandrau’s booklet promotes the discovery of the pass by Great Northern civil engineer John F. Stevens in 1889. “Travelers, unless they happen to be civil engineers, which, of course, most of them are not, are in the habit of taking the passing of railroads through mountain ranges, entirely for granted,” she writes on the booklet’s first page.

The booklet promotes a high point of Montana railroading history: it’s epic stuff, perfect for the eyes of prospective passengers who might be enticed to head west and experience the grandeur of the Backbone of the World first hand.

You can learn more about the career of Grace Flandrau in Georgia Ray’s 2007 biography of the author, “Voice Interrupted.”

In his review of the biography, Paul Froiland writes that “Ray has elevated St. Paul, Minnesota, novelist and journalist Grace Flandrau from obscurity to her rightful place alongside her contemporaries — Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather and Ring Lardner. This book is the first step in rehabilitating the reputation of one of the great — and most undeservedly forgotten — descriptive writers of the twentieth century.”

Copyright (c) 2010 by Malcolm R. Campbell, author of “The Sun Singer,” a novel set in Glacier National Park. My article about the park’s Swiftcurrent Valley appears in “Nature’s Gifts,” an anthology of fiction, nonfiction and poetry celebrating nature to be released by Vanilla Heart Publishing in March.

Glacier Centennial: Helen P. Clarke

As the 2010 centennial of Montana’s Glacier National Park approaches, I’ve been looking at the histories and stories of those who are part of the park’s heritage.

Helen Piotopowaka Clarke (1843-1923)–known by many as “Miss Nellie”–was the first woman in the Montana Territory to be elected to public office (1880) when she became Superintendent of Public Instruction for the county now named Lewis and Clark. Previously, she had worked as a teacher in Ft. Benton.

After the Indian Allotment Act was passed by Congress in 1887, Clarke, helped the Blackfeet establish their allotments, and then was appointed as an allotment agent by President Benjamin Harrison in October 1890. She worked with multiple tribes out of the Ponca Agency in the Oklahoma Territory where she was the only female agent.

When prospectors and developers found gold, copper and other minerals on the Piegans’ mountain land in the years after the Civil War, public pressure forced the Federal Government into negotiations to obtain the land so that legal claims could be filed and worked. Helen helped her tribe in the negotiations that eventually led to the sale of the land east of the continental divide in today’s Glacier National Park in 1896. The boom–which included a mining town named Altyn in the current park’s Swiftcurrent Valley–lasted only a few years before it was obvious that the mineral deposits were insufficient to support mining operations. This mountain land has historically been called the ceded strip. The park was created in 1910.

Helen’s parents were a Scottish-American fur trader and rancher Egbert Malcolm Clarke and Kakokima (often spelled Cothcocoma), daughter of the Piegan (Blackfeet) Chief Big Snake. Malcolm Clarke had an excellent relationship with the Piegan in spite of the growing hostilities between whites and the Piegan at the time. His Piegan name was Nisohkyaiyo (Four Bears). In addition to Helen, he and Kakokima had three other children, Horace, Nathan and Isabel.

Helen P. Clarke’s name often surfaces in history as a survivor of the night when Piegan relatives murdered her father and wounded her brother Horace after weeks of disputes over Malcolm Clarke’s stolen horses. The Piegan side of Helen’s family had always been welcome on her father’s ranch on Prickly Pear Creek along with others from the tribe; most of the tribe mourned his murder. Helen blamed only Eagle Ribs (who killed Clarke) and Pete Owl Child (who wounded Horace). Owl Child was Helen’s mother’s cousin and Eagle Ribs was a son of Mountain Chief.

The public saw Clarke’s murder as another in a long series of incidents of unacceptable unrest in the territory and demanded retribution against the overtly hostile Mountain Chief. While a grand jury had indicted five Piegans in the murder of Malcolm Clarke and had requested their apprehension by the Army, General Philip H. Sheridan preferred to “strike” Indian Camps. William T Sherman, General of the Army, approved of Sheridan’s approach even though officers in Montana said the solution required a police-style approach.

Colonel E. M. Baker was sent with a troop to “chastise” Mountain Chief and his band of Piegans. The orders stated specifically that friendly Chief Heavy Runner and his band on the Marias River was not to be harmed. On the morning of January 23, 1870, Baker’s troop swept through the village of Heavy Runner, killing the Chief and 173 others, including 140 women and children. Even though he was told by his scouts it was the wrong camp, Baker would maintain later that he did not know this. Baker’s superiors supported his action. The action is now known alternately as “The Baker Massacre” and “The Marias Massacre.”

After the death of her father, Helen went east where she studied drama. Subsequently, she would perform for a short period of time to much acclaim, especially her Shakespeare, in London, Paris and Berlin. After serving as the school superintendent and the allotment agent, she taught briefly in San Francisco before returning to a ranch with her bother Horace in Midvale (now East Glacier) on land that came from their allotments.

Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier, sits on a portion of Horace’s allotment which was purchased by the Great Northern Railway for the hotel site. The Hotel was built in 1913.

Although the source of Glacier National Park’s Lake Helen is debated, explorer, writer and friend of the Piegan Jame Willard Schultz attributes the name to Helen Clarke.

Author Jack Holterman has written that when Miss Nellie was in her 70s, she was described as a woman with a large bony, stooped frame, black sparkling eyes, beautiful white hair, and a deep theatrical voice. She is buried in the family cemetery at Midvale.

Today, more people know of her for her father’s murder than for her own good works. Helen’s Piegan name, Piotopowaka, is certainly apt. It is best translated as “The Bird That Comes Back.”

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For More Information, consult the following books in addition to Internet resources:

Who was Who in Glacier Land, by Jack Holterman
Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Own Path, by Nancy M. Peterson
The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains, by John C. Ewers

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell author of “The Sun Singer,” a novel set in Glacier National Park.

Glacier Park Centennial: Post Card Contest

from NPS Glacier

Glacier's Chief Mountain

Glacier National Park Invites Students to Celebrate, Inspire, and Engage Through Art for a Postcard Contest

Glacier National Park’s Education Program and the Glacier Association are again sponsoring a postcard contest for K-12 students. As Glacier approaches its 100th anniverary, the focus for this year’s contest relates to the Centennial themes of “Celebrate, Inspire, and Engage.” In particular, to “engagement” as the next 100 years of Glacier’s future depends on the participation of today’s youth in helping to protect and preserve park resources.

The purpose of the poscard contest is to promote learning and stewardship of Glacier National Park through the creation of messages from local students to future Glacier National Park visitors. First place winning entries in each category will be made into postcards to be given to the visiting public at Glacier Association bookstores throughout the park.

Winners will be announced by the end of November. The first place winning entry in each category will receive a Glacier Association gift certificate for $25 and be made into a free postcard to be handed out at Association sales areas. The second place winner will receive a $15 gift certificate. Third place and honorable mention entries in each category will receive a book from the Association.

The Glacier Association is a non-profit cooperating association of the National Park Service. Glacier Association helps to support Glacier National Park’s educational, interpretive, cultural and scientific program needs.

Deadline is October 31, 2009. Details and entry form here.
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Many Glacier Hotel Fans: My mountain adventure novel The Sun Singer is set in a fictionalized version of the hotel and Swiftcurrent Vally. The book’s action fits hand-in-glove into the park’s eastern-side environment where I climbed mountains, hiked and worked as a seasonal employee.

Coming Soon, a discussion with author Pat Bertram about gangsters, quests, and her new book Daughter Am I.

West Hollywood Book Fair: Volunteers set up and staffed my publisher’s (Vanilla Heart) booth even though most of the books and promotional items intended for display were stolen by burglars several days before the October 4th fair. See Jock Stewart’s commentary on this contemptible theft, Waking Up in LA.

Fortunately, a few copies of Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire escaped the thieves’ notice and made it to the booth!

Malcolm

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Book Review: ‘Fate is a Mountain’

Fate Is A Mountain by Mark W. Parratt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Mark, Monty and Smitty Parratt had a big back yard between 1950 and 1964, the million-acre Crown of the Continent in northwestern Montana called Glacier National Park. The boys’ father, the late Lloyd Parratt and his wife Grace brought the family to the shores of the park’s St, Mary Lake every summer where Lloyd worked as a seasonal ranger naturalist for the National Park Service. Later, Mark Parratt served as a fireguard and the late Monty Parratt worked on a Blister Rust crew.

Since Mark and Monty were avid fishermen, the book includes many great fishing stories along with climbing and hiking adventures, the trials and tribulations of living in a remote cabin accessible only by rail, a stormy night in a fire lookout, canoeing on a rough St. Mary Lake, and encounters with wildlife.

For local residents, these stories will bring back old memories; for park visitors, the delightful exploits of three young men in their coming-of-age years will cast the trails, lakes and mountains along the back bone of the world into a deeper perspective. Comments appended to some of the stories note how the park has changed over the years.

The harrowing centerpiece to the book is “The Otokomi Grizzly Bear Attack” of July 18, 1960. Ten-year-old Smitty Parratt was badly mauled by a grizzly bear as he returned from a fishing trip to Lake Otokomi with two ranger naturalists and two tourists. The story of the attack, the injuries, the rescue and the aftermath demonstrates courage, resourcefulness and grit while serving as a cautionary reminder that wild places are wild.

The “Fate is a Mountain” (June 1962) and “Lone Climber Missing” (July 1963) stories describe mountain search and rescue operations at Mt. Henkel near Many Glacier Hotel and at Going-to-the-Sun Mountain in the St. Mary Valley. Search-team members routinely place themselves in harm’s way while looking for missing climbers, as Parratt describes in a late-night moment on the slopes of Mt. Henkel:

“Suddenly, a tremendous crash echoed from above. Instinctively, we all dove into crouching positions next to a nearby cliff face. A shower of lose scree was rapidly followed by a thunder of large bounders that careened over our heads and plummeted toward the valley below. Smaller pieces of snow and rock pelted our hard hats for several moments.” (This reviewer has climbed Mt. Henkel and appreciates the challenges of a rescue attempt.)

Compiling these stories was obviously a labor of love and of remembering bygone days where a family’s life intersects the world of a beloved tourist destination and wildlife preserve. If there’s an omission here, it’s the lack of a story about the Montana flood of June, 1964, quite possibly the state’s worst natural disaster, that caused extensive damage to roads and facilities throughout the park including those at St. Mary.

The book provides a rich, insider’s look at the world of Glacier National Park as it was over 40 forty years ago. As the park approaches its 2010 centennial, these stories as part of its history add to our understanding of the place and the people who worked and played there.

View all my reviews >>

Published by Sun Point Press in Whitefish, Montana, the book is available on line at Barnes & Noble and Amazon and at selected stores near the park.

Glacier Park to Begin Winter Program

 “Winter Signs” Weekend Snowshoe Programs Begin January 11

Glacier’s snowshoe excursions offered twice daily on Saturdays and Sundays through March 15

WEST GLACIER, MONT. – Ever wonder how plants and animals survive the challenges of Glacier National Park’s winter season? Beginning January 11, 2009, the public is invited to join a free, two-hour, ranger-led snowshoe excursions of the winter environment to discover how the park’s winter residents survive the cold and harsh months of winter. These guided outings are suitable for all ages and abilities and are made possible through a grant from the Glacier National Park Fund.

 

Starting Sunday, January 11th weekend snowshoe programs will be offered twice daily each Saturday and Sunday through March 15th (weather and snow conditions permitting). Excursions begin at 10:30 a.m. and at 1:30 p.m. each weekend day. In the event of severe weather or insufficient snow, individuals should call Apgar Visitor Center at 406-888-7939 before 12 noon on respective weekend days to confirm that day’s outing. Snowshoes are available for $2 at the Apgar Visitor Center. Participants may also bring their own equipment. Snowshoes are also available for rent in West Glacier and elsewhere in gateway communities.These wintertime tours begin and conclude at the Apgar Visitor Center. There is no group size limit and no reservations are taken. Participants should wear sturdy winter boots and dress in layers for varying winter conditions; they should also bring water bottles/devises for personal drinking water.

Park visitors are reminded that although these winter activities are free, valid park entry is required. Even when entrance stations are not staffed, park entrance fees are required. Upon entering the park, visitors are directed to follow posted instructions to pay entrance fees at self-pay stations. Glacier’s winter entrance fee is $15 for vehicles and $10 for single entrants (hiker/bicyclist/motorcyclist) for a seven day pass. The winter entrance fee is $15 for a seven-day single vehicle entry. Annual park passes, valid for unlimited visits to Glacier National Park for 12 months from the date of purchase, are also available for $35.

For more information or to confirm that day’s snowshoe programs, please call the Apgar Visitor Center at 406-888-7939, on weekends, between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

 - NPS -

Hiker Lost in Glacier National Park

Hwa

I’ve been following the story of Yi-Jien Hwa who’s been missing in Glacier National Park, Montana since August 20. He had filed a back country permit with a fairly extensive hiking plan, part of which would take him into areas most people never see.

Since Glacier’s mountains, lakes and hotels have, for some, a cute Swiss ambiance, they often underestimate the requirements of long hikes or the dangers of exposed trails, wildlife and weather. When I worked in the park many years ago, I thought nothing of hiking 25+ miles in a day. But it would be foolhardy for me to do that now. But a lot of people don’t know what’s foolhardy and what isn’t when they enter remote areas, worse yet, when they hike alone as Yi-Jien Hwa is doing.

If I lived near the park, I would definitely volunteer to look for him. For now, one can only speculate about the outcome, wondering how so many people can walk the trails he supposedly was walking and see no sign of him. Was he ever there? Did he get the permit as a ruse and head off to another state or country? Did an impulse send him down a trail that took him well out of the main search area? We may never know, but we can keep our fingers crossed and continue to hope.

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Here’s today’s News Release from the National Park Service. I believe there’s a proofreading error in it, for it mentions ascents of 14,000 feet. There are no mountains in the park even close to that elevation.:

WEST GLACIER, MONT. – Officials at Glacier National Park said today that no clues about the whereabouts or condition of a hiker reported missing in the Park’s backcountry last month had turned up in searches that continued over the weekend. They said that pending the emergence or discovery of information that might explain the hiker’s disappearance, the search and rescue operation launched nearly two weeks ago would be significantly reduced.

“Reluctantly, after more than 2,500 hours of searching in difficult terrain and challenging conditions, the time has come to acknowledge that we are unlikely to solve this mystery without additional information,” the Park’s superintendent, Chas Cartwright, said. “We are disappointed that our efforts have not succeeded in explaining what has become of this enthusiastic young outdoorsman, especially for the sake of his family.”

Beginning on August 20th, the day after Yi-Jien Hwa, 27, was reported missing by his family, the Park sent teams of hikers and professional alpine searchers into the most forbidding areas of its backcountry to look for him or for evidence that he had passed through areas he planned to hike. Mr. Hwa, a native of Malaysia, had drawn up an itinerary for himself and his wife that encompassed nearly 100 miles of hikes as well as climbs and descents of more than 14,000 feet. His wife did not accompany him because of a family emergency.

Each day, between 30 and 60 searchers were shuttled in and out of remote areas by helicopter. The searches included use of human-scent dog teams and of horse-mounted patrols. The search operation also had access to aerial heat-sensing equipment.

Hikers and mountaineers searched through some of northwestern Montana’s most forbidding terrain as fall weather arrived early. The search area encompasses lakes, extensive cliff bands, glaciers, glacial melt ponds, crevasses, ice and snow bridges, forests, and shaded areas near ridges.
Fresh snowfall, rain, fog, and high-winds made search operations and footing especially difficult in this diverse terrain.

Agencies that helped to plan the searches or contributed search personnel included the Flathead County and Glacier County sheriff’s departments, the US Border Patrol, and the US Forest Service. The Federal Bureau of Investigation helped to follow up on information received from the public by the National Park Service.

“We have not ceased to hope that we will receive or discover information that will help us to find Mr. Hwa or to find out what happened to him,” the operation’s Incident Commander, Patrick Suddath, said today. “We simply had to make the decision that committing the resources at the level we have committed them over the past two weeks could not continue based on the information we had to go on.”

Over the weekend, one or two teams of searchers continued to scour locations adjacent to areas that were identified as most likely to have been hiked by Mr. Hwa, assuming that he had followed his plan as outlined in his backcountry permit. Human-scent dog teams also were used. No new clues turned up in those efforts. In a meeting today, the search’s managers decided to discontinue regular searches.

Suddath described a continuing operation that represents a vastly reduced effort compared to searches that have been mounted to date. He said he would retain overall responsibility for analyzing any new information and determining how to respond, including whether to send out searchers. He said he would not hesitate to order searches when warranted by such information.

Suddath asks that anyone who has seen Mr. Hwa or who has information that might help to locate him call Glacier National Park at 406-888-7801. He said investigators will follow up on information they receive from Park personnel who regularly hike areas in Mr. Hwa’s itinerary.

In addition, fresh posters with Mr. Hwa’s picture and description seeking information will be put up in campgrounds and visitor centers, at trailheads, and elsewhere in the Park this week.

– NPS -