Free Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen

under the seas, a mass of molten lava squirted out of the ocean floor and congealed into a vast ledge of basalt, and now this slab of dark rock, ranging in thickness from 50 to 275 feet, reaches for hundreds of yards around the chalet. The fine-grained basalt is the reason for the misnomer “Granite” Park. To old-time prospectors, almost every igneous rock was granite, whether it was light in color like true granite or gray-black like the basalt of this mountainside. Here and there, spatters of green-and yellow-and orange-colored lichens have succeeded in breaking down portions of the rocky slab, and miniature trees and bushes keep trying to establish homesteads in the new soil thus created, but they are seldom able to achieve a height of more than a foot or two; they are dwarfs consigned to dwarfism for at least a few more centuries.
    In this timberline setting, several species of fauna somehow manage to thrive. Columbian ground squirrels are common, and occasionally one sees a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Marmots whistle at intruders, and every year or two one of the mischievous beaver-sized animals will allow itself to be perverted into hanging around the chalet, taking handouts, and the local newspapers will scurry up and shoot pictures. Higher on the steep mountainside, up toward the 7,200-foot Swiftcurrent Pass, mountain goats gambol about, and deer browse on almost nothing, seeming to find the thin slivers of vegetation as delicious as they are minuscule. Now and then, an elk will shoulder its way through the region, but the big-antlered animals are not common here. Of the larger mammals, only the grizzly appears with absolute regularity. The bench just below the chalet is alive with some of the pieces de resistance of the grizzly cuisine, and in certain seasons of the year, the soil of the bench is pockmarked from the busy, nocturnal diggings of the hungry bears. In the middle of this ursine happy hunting ground, the government has established a public campground. It is used by an occasional visitor to the park, but seldom by rangers.
    When Tom Walton and his wife, Nancy, accepted the summertime job at Granite Park Chalet, they had only the vaguest idea of what they were doing. The only certainties were that they had some time off between semesters, and the pay was not bad, and they needed to lay up a few dollars for the next year when Tom would be working on his master’s degree at the University of Denver. For four previous summers, the 23 year-old Walton had worked as a firefighter, but this new opening at the remote and isolated Granite Park Chalet would offer him and his wife twenty-four hours of daily togetherness, minus the dangers that came from roaring fires. So they accepted, and late in June, 1967, they found themselves picking their way up the snowy trail on horseback. The chalet was half-buried in drifts, even at this late date, but they were surprised to find no grizzly tracks. One of the ranger executives at headquarters had told them that he had made a few flights over the chalet earlier in the spring, and there had always been grizzlies around, and once he had seen six on the chalet roof. Walton, a gentle person despite his fireplug build and his experience as a football lineman, was just as glad.
    For several days, they worked almost around the clock, readying the chalet that they would help to manage all summer, along with Mrs. Eileen Anderson. The Waltons would take care of the guests, and Mrs. Anderson, a middle-aged woman from Minnesota, would boss a crew of girls who attended to everything else: the kitchen work, the bed making, and the general housekeeping. It fell to Tom Walton, as the only man on the premises, to dig out the water system; it lay under five feet of snow and took him the better part of a day to reach. It also fell to him to fire up a small incinerator that the Park Service had installed for burning garbage, but only a few trials with the gadget showed the young Walton