Wyoming History in the First Person: Guns in the National Park, and Why Each Was Needed

Normally vehicles leaving a national park slow at the gate, then drive on. But the ranger at Yellowstone’s south entrance signaled us to stop. The year was 1987. Barbara and I, having lingered over dinner at the Old Faithful Inn, were heading south in the dark on our Yamaha touring bike. We intended to drive through Grand Teton National Park and on into the national forest. I remembered a side road where we might find a place to pitch our tent.

The Yellowstone ranger warned us to be on the lookout for a hitchhiker. A prisoner had escaped in Montana and law enforcement in the region was on general alert. As we approached Moran Junction half an hour later, red and blue flashing lights demanded another stop. I almost lost control of the bike when a powerful spot light blinded me. The ranger explained. He was making sure I “couldn’t see this.” "This" was a shotgun.

A ranger with a gun?

An armed ranger was still not a comfortable sight, even though almost thirty years had passed since I locked the Death Canyon Ranger Station for the last time, mounted my saddle horse and rode back down the canyon, pack horse trailing behind.

At that time, the summer of 1959, I personally knew of only three guns within the Grand Teton park boundary. One was the .38 Police Special reportedly locked away in the safe in the Chief Ranger’s office. It was taken out once a year to be cleaned, we heard. Seemed to make sense that people who wore badges and enforced laws should keep a weapon somewhere on the premises, just in case.

GTNP Park Headquarters, 1959.

The building was criticized for being "too modernistic"

(GTNP)

GTNP Park Headquarters today.

(GTNP)

The second gun was the big six shooter a cowboy was wearing on the trail one day. He was showing off for the dudes strung out behind him. The district ranger had instructed us what to do. I ordered him to put the gun out of sight in his saddle bags and not bring it into the Park again.

The no guns rule gets bent

Cascade Canyon Ranger Station.
(Sometimes misidentified in an online photo as
Death Canyon Ranger Station.)
(GTNP)

The third weapon was the pistol at the Cascade Ranger Station, a few miles north of Death Canyon. The seasonal ranger posted there had requested and received permission, official but clandestine, to arm himself. The mountain wilderness was new to him. He was accompanied by a wife and infant daughter. Park authorities understood why he would feel vulnerable.

Also anticipating unknown dangers, I got myself a handgun that spring too. It was in a drawer at home. As I prepared to spend three months living alone in the mountains, the gun didn't even come to mind. I bought it because I was scheduled to attend graduate school in a big city.

That year both back country rangers in GTNP wasted money on guns they didn't need, and both for the same reason: fear of the unfamiliar.

Nobody Had Seen One in Thirty Years

Wolverine
(GTNP)

Two versions of the story circulated in Grand Teton National Park headquarters. Those who knew me said, “Don saw a wolverine at Marion Lake.” Others said, “That seasonal up in Death Canyon claims he saw a wolverine at Marion Lake."

Uncertainty was understandable. The year was 1959. The last reported wolverine sighting in the Lower 48—except for along the Canadian border in Glacier National Park—dated from before the war.

Got a good look, twice

Marion Lake, nestled above timberline in a bowl between the heads of Death and Granite Canyons, is the size of two or three football fields. Spud and Sandy were grazing on their picket ropes in the meadow east of the lake. I had just finished setting up camp near the shore, in the protection of a glacial erratic surrounded by scrub spruce. A tall cliff rose almost vertically across the water.

Stones rattled in the scree at the base of the cliff. Then a second time. My binoculars quickly picked out the source of the sound. A wolverine was turning over rocks, hunting rodents. I watched, fascinated, for probably half an hour. The clatter resumed as the sun came up the next morning. Again, I was treated to an extended viewing.

They spotted it too

My report went into the records as unconfirmed. It was revised to confirmed that September, after the summer season ended and I had moved on. Four hikers from the Sierra Club had hurried into park headquarters and excitedly reported they saw a wolverine when camped at Marion Lake.

According to a recent article from Jackson Hole, a wolverine population is reestablished in Grand Teton. Not that they are seen often. They are solitary animals and range over a wide territory.

Some people were puzzled by my certainty regarding the sighting. In high school I played football for the Riverton Wolverines. We had a stuffed one in our trophy case.