The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

Years ago an old Glacier National Park worker named Jim Whitt wrote a tiny book entitled. "Giggles from Glacier Guides". It included stories that Glacier guides have used for years and years to entertain dudes and dudettes.

Red bus drivers use some of these stories daily only they embellish them even more than Whitt did.

I even used some of them when doing Bear Paw tours.

So, with apologies to Whitt and other old time Glacier Guides, here are some of my favorite giggles from the book and other places.

Even though there are no poisonous snakes in Glacier National Park, there are very dangerous hoop snakes. Hoop snakes are grouchy and like only to be left alone. They love to reside in solitary splendor on the tops of Glacier's peaks. They hate people disturbing their lofty revere.

Upon hearing a climber coming close to the top of their peak, they will curl up, stick their tail in their mouths and roll down like a hoop to where the climber is. At finding the climber, they will straighten out, bite the climbers ankle like you can't believe and slither back up top. The climber is left limping back down the mountainside hoping that the next peak he chooses will not be home to a hoop snake.

There are Glacier's famous Side Hill Gaugers. They can easily be seen when looking at mountain slopes that have a slight terraced effect. Some say these terraces are the product of buffalo grazing thousands of years ago. Others say the terraces are the product of old lake fluctuations. All wrong!!!!!

Side Hill Gaugers or Gaugers as they are called are about the size and coloring of a raccoon only without the mask. They were, thousands of years ago, everyone's favorite meal as they were so fat they could not get away quickly enough. So, after thousands of years they evolved into animals whose legs on one side were longer than the other side. They became, quickly enough, right handed or left handed side hill gaugers, started making two paths one over the other, where they ran, hence the miniscule terraces. Now, you might ask, if one can only run on one direction, why don't they run out of the mountains and all end up down by Glasgow or Wolf Point? Simple, the mountains are round so they spend their lives going round and round the mountains.

Talk about tough love. There is some of that in the Gauger families. If, and it happens once in a blue moon, a mother right hand Gauger gives birth to a left hand baby Gauger,(Gauger kid, as it is called), the mother will not even know she gave birth and soon the abandoned kid will die.

High among the peaks fly many black crows and black ravens. Some ravens are easy to identify because they fly around screaming out, "Nevermore, Nevermore!" However, not all do and many people misidentify both by trying to identify them by size. While it is true that ravens are generally larger and crows are generally smaller, one could be looking at a fat crow and think it was a small raven or look at an emaciated raven and decide it is a crow.

Here is a sure fire way to identify each bird, and never be fooled. Count the pinion feathers as they fly by. All ravens have five pinion feathers. All crows have four pinion feathers. In fact, one could say that the difference between a raven and a crow is a matter of a pinion!

Some people see the spots of snow in Glacier on some of the tall peaks and they immediately think they are looking at Glaciers. Glacier guides assure the dudes and dudettes they are not, but they are just looking at patches of snow that have not melted yet.

The Blackfeet have a name for these spots of snow on peaks like Heaven's Peak. They are called Indian snow. Why? The answer is so simple. Apache here and Apache there!

Speaking of the Blackfeet, they have a name for burned out forests where there are thousands of tall burned out trees standing stark like ships masts. Blackfeet call those places the "Silent Dog Forest".

Why? Because all the trees have lost their bark.

Standing at Wild Goose Overlook on the shore of Upper St. Mary Lake, one of the prominent peaks has an interesting history that may or may not be true.

The official name for the peak is Mount Fussilade. However, some wags say that it is really the Paramount Picture Mountain. In every Paramount film for years and years there is a mountain. It does bare a resemblance to our Mount Fussilade. Park rangers deny this and implore guides not to spread that rumor.

I, personally, do not know if that is the Paramount mountain or not but I do remember that when I was a boy and when Glacier still had money, rangers used to come out each night and turn the stars on each night around that particular mountain.

"High up in the main range of the Rockies in Glacier Park is a rugged, broken, shaggy spire known as the Mongrel Range. Mutt Mountain is the largest and highest peak. On its eastern slope is Pooch Glacier, a vast ice field; both Poodle and Shepard creeks flow down separate gulches into Dog Lake, a very clear lake of exquisite beauty. It is the head of the Hound River which is a very swift stream till it reaches the valley and there they have built a large Power Plant known as Cur Dam. This is purely hearsay and I believe very little of it. My belief is that the river and the story are both as crooked as a dog's hind leg."

When they decided to build the Ptarmingan tunnel, there had been a heavy rain. It rained so hard that it washed the dirt away from all the gopher holes and they stuck up all over the prairie. We guides had to go out and cut them off and package them into bundles. Then they were packed on packhorses and pushed into the mountain. They only lacked thirty feet of going clear through, so that thirty feet was all they had to dig."

"Hank McVey was the best fisherman the park ever had and he had one secret stream where he took most of his parties. There the fish were a foot long at birth and in the spring Hank had to go there and walk along the stream to keep the fish headed up. If one got crosswise it backed the water up so there was a flood. Bill Heald was another very proficient guide. Whenever he had a dude who had never ridden, he always gave him a horse that had never been rode, so you see neither had any advantage over the other; he let them learn together."

"One time Diamond Dick was taking a party around the Devil's Elbow where there is a sheer drop off of about eight hundred feet. One dude asked him if people fell off there very often? 'Only once', Dick said. There was a time when they used long horses in the park, three saddles to a horse, but the park trail makers put in the switchbacks on the trails and the long horses could not get their hind legs around the corners so the horse company had to get shorter horses."

"Speaking of sheep, we have the usual bighorn. Some old rams have horns so large they are unable to carry them naturally. They have conceived the idea of putting two small wheels under their chins so as to support the weight of their horns. In winter they substitute runners in place of the wheels. We have two kinds of sheep, the bighorn that I have just told you about and the other is called the iron sheep. Every spring we have to round up the latter and sheer them for it is the iron sheep that furnishes the steel wool."

"There is a real park vocabulary, for no one is known by his right name. For example guides are dude wranglers, bell hops are pack rats, bus drivers are gear jammers, cooks are dough smokers, waitresses are garbage heavers, chambermaids are sheet snatchers, laundry girls are bubble queens and clerks are pencil pushers while the dishwashers are pearl divers."

Many people want to know what I do when not being a gear jammer. I have a wonderful job that starts October first and continues on to the end of the year. I help the rangers close down the park. My job is to climb up to each waterfall, turn the crank and shut them all off for the winter.

While I am doing that, others are running around the Park gathering up all the livestock. Some is shipped to Yellowstone so they will see some critters sometime during the year but most of the stock is kept in large pens up by Whitefish.

Some, roll up the lakes and on December 24th, we all get together and very carefully lay down the mountains until next April when we will come in and pop them up again for a brand new season in Glacier National Park!