Trip to Curator's Office

For my book, I recently spent the day down just outside the park at the Park Administration offices, researching old picture. It was just amazing to see and handle actual photos from the late 1800's to early 1900's. Wearing gloves, I dove into boxes and boxes of carefully arranged photographs of various park happenings from years past and my mind got lost on a journey of history. Back then, the women wore heavy dresses, petticoats and hats for things like skiing, hiking, and camping. I can't imagine how difficult those things must have been in yards and yards of fabric. The men wore similar outfits, such as suit jackets with matching fedoras. The park roads were in construction during those days and it took many miles on either horseback or 1900's cars to arrive at the park on dirt roads. They had all sorts of issues with horse vs. cars using the roads and there were fatalities on a regular basis. Imagine- someone new to driving and new to the automobile is cruising down a dirt road with very few road rules, when suddenly a blind corner gives way to folks on horses. The roads were very narrow and the drop offs deep. In the archives there are lots of documents describing the chaos.

There were so many pictures it made my head spin. I did find a couple that I'd like to use in my book, but there is a cost involved, so we'll see if the budget line allows. Regardless, it was a fantastic trip into history. Here are a few pictures from the day.

I brought a delicious salad in a cooler for lunch and ate it on the porch of the National Park Inn. I had a great view and some blue feathered friends for company. Believe it or not, there is still lots of snow there!


This was one of the photos that I could not believe. Back in the early 1900's the park had all kinds of bear conditioning issues. People were feeding them from car windows and rangers were guiding groups of tourists on 'bear tours' where they would hand-feed well known park bears, honey. In the 50's when tourism was peaking and camp sites were packed, bears became a serious issue and rangers would drive their trucks into campgrounds at night with the horns blaring and lights flashing in attempts to scare the bears back into the woods. But bears are brilliant, and quickly figured out to stay away from rangers and their trucks and figured out that any other car or person was fair game. It was a dangerous situation. The picture below was an amazing one- this guy was a park worker at Paradise lodge around the year 1929 who frequently put peanut butter on his face to have the bears 'kiss' him. Oh how far we've come!