There was lightning the night Michele Koons and Julie Helgeson died. So much so that for a time it was believed to have contributed to what happened to the young women.

It was August of 1967, nearly 50 years ago, when the two 19-year-old girls were killed during the night in the first fatal grizzly maulings in Glacier National Park.

The incident is haunting, not only for its place as the first tragedy of this sort in the park but because Koons and Helgeson were killed by two different bears in two different areas of the park.

To this day, the terrible coincidence can't be fully explained. But according to former Glacier Park ranger Dave Shea, the event was inevitable.

Bears were lured by garbage left in high-use areas, sometimes intentionally, until they were habituated to associate humans with food.

"Park management in those days was pretty lax about bears and that's probably because there hadn't been a serious incident for many, many years," Shea said. "But obviously they weren't being treated with the right respect."

Back in the 1960s, Glacier National Park was a far different place than it is now.

Management was lax. And why not? No serious incidents had occurred between man and bear since the park was founded in 1910. Shea said the bear management guide was maybe three pages long.

Garbage littered popular campsites and was even used to lure bears into populated areas for the delight of visitors.

The storm clouds were gathering.

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On Aug. 12, amid fire and lightning striking through the park, then 27-year-old Bert Gildart was working as a road patrol park ranger. That evening he was out late escorting trucks through burn areas.

Then around midnight, he heard a voice come in over the radio asking for someone to relay a message to headquarters about a bear mauling at Granite Park Chalet.

Gildart forwarded the message and then headed back to his apartment to settle in and get some sleep. Then, four hours later, he woke to a ranger knocking on his door to tell him about what happened to Michele Koons.

"I just couldn't believe there had been another mauling," Gildart said. "I said, 'No, you've got to be mistaken' and he said, 'No, this was not at Granite Park Chalet, this was at Trout Lake.'"

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Gildart jumped in his truck and drove down to the Trout Lake Trailhead near Lake McDonald and ran almost four miles up the trail and over Howe Ridge to the alpine lake.

When he arrived at the scene, fellow ranger Leonard Landa had already arrived by helicopter. They spread out to look for the body.

Landa walked 40 yards and then looked up at Gildart and said, "Here she is."

What he found was something Gildart remembers vividly, even 50 years later. His eyes grow wide as he recounts the scene.

"When Leonard and I and the helicopter pilot found this girl, she was horribly mauled," Gildart said. "She was mangled beyond belief. At that time I said, 'How did this happen? Is this the nature of bears?'"

Koons was from San Diego, and was working in the park as a gift shop saleswoman during the summer of 1967.

On Saturday, Aug. 12, she set out with Paul Dunn, Ray Noseck, Ron Noseck, Denise Huckle and Koons' dog, Squirt, to Trout Lake. Even at that time, dogs were not allowed in the park.

Only a week prior to Koons' outing to the lake, a troop of Girl Scouts hiking in the area was chased by a bear. The bear stole some of the girls' food and then moved on. No one was injured.

A few weeks before that, the Hungry Horse News ran a photo of what is believed to be the same bear, though they misidentified it as a black bear because of its small size.

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The bear was known to be trouble long before Aug. 12, 1967.

"That bear had been hanging around at the head of Lake McDonald where there was a private outfit called Kelly's Camp," Shea said. "It was going back and forth, getting into garbage there. That was the same bear. We knew there was something not quite right with it."

As Koons and her friends hiked to Trout Lake, they also crossed paths with a group that warned them about a bear they saw in the area.

Management never sought to euthanize the unhealthy, problem bear.

"In those days, the management philosophy was different," Shea said. "Looking back, hindsight is 20/20, something should have been done. Today, that bear would have been a goner."

When Koons and her friends arrived at their camping spot, the bear was quick to make its first appearance.

The hungry sow approached the group's campsite and stole some of their food and left to search a nearby log jam. The friends decided to move their site closer to the shore of the lake and then lit a bonfire to ward off any further encounters.

At night, they settled into their sleeping bags under the stars and went to sleep.

Then, the bear returned.

Huckle told rangers she awoke to the bear sniffing her bag. It was close enough for her to see its face in the dark and feel its breath on her skin. She laid as still as possible. The bear eventually left her and sniffed around the other sleeping bags.

Then the bear approached Koons. She woke up and screamed.

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What happened next was a frenzied mess of terror. The four friends shot out of their bags, one with Squirt in tow, and climbed up into the trees. Dunn said he yelled for Koons to get out of her bag and climb a tree too.

Koons was said to have yelled back that her zipper was stuck, that the bear was tearing her arm off and then finally, "Oh my god, I'm dead."

From the trees, Koons' friends screamed and yelled, hoping to scare the bear off. But Koons had spoken her final words and Dunn saw the bear drag her away.

The four survivors remained in the trees for more than two hours. At dawn, they came down and ran for the nearest ranger station.

That's when Gildart and Landa responded and discovered her mauled body about 100 yards from the campsite.

"This most recent (mauling in the summer of 2016), the person riding their bicycle around a corner and hitting a bear, he wasn't horribly mauled — he was killed, but he wasn't chewed up or anything else," Gildart said. "The bear was trying to protect itself and that's often times what I think happens ... This bear (at Trout Lake), for some reason or another, had associated food with people and maybe they were going after the people for food, I don't know. I have no idea about that. I just know that this one girl was chewed on."

Dunn told AP he thought maybe Koons' scream aggravated the bear. Some have guessed that the lightning and fire had the bears stirred up and defensive. Others have speculated, given the nature of one of her injuries, that the bear might have been attracted to Koons because she was menstruating.

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Gildart and Landa stayed in the valley to give any hikers they found an armed escort out of the backcountry. Then, they were sent back to Trout Lake with orders to shoot any bear they found.

They had no luck on their first day.

But the next morning, Gildart went outside the ranger station they were staying in and saw a bear standing about 30 feet away. The grizzly raised up and looked out over the bank of the lake. Gildart yelled back to Landa and said to get the rifles.

"The bear started moving toward us," Gildart said. "We shot it. It was unusual behavior. Normally the bears that I've encountered in the wild, and there have been a lot of them now, always seem to run. They don't want to have anything to do with people."

A forensic expert was flown to Trout Lake to inspect the sow and determine if Gildart had shot the bear responsible for Koons' death.

"He sliced open the stomach and a big ball of blonde hair came tumbling out," Gildart said.

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Gildart's eyes widen and his hands gesture to his own stomach.

"It was determined on the spot that this bear had glass embedded in its teeth," Gildart said. "So here you had a bear with difficulty chewing and eating in the first place and as well a bear that was horribly emaciated or run down. It couldn't eat. It weighed slightly over 200 pounds. It wasn't a big bear at all. It was about 20 years old, an emaciated sow. That's the reason why it probably fed on the girl."

The things Gildart had seen at Trout Lake were burned into his memory and ignited a rage against the creatures that had done this to Koons.

"I didn't have a very positive feeling at that time for bears," Gildart said. "You have two bear maulings occur in the same night by bears that are apparently just marauding, we didn't know what caused all this ... I had no problem at all shooting that bear."

He was angry for years until he learned more about what caused that terrible evening.

On the evening of Aug. 9, 1967, only four days before the infamous Night of the Grizzlies, Shea, Gildart and two other rangers were visiting Granite Park Chalet. They saw five grizzlies, including a sow with two cubs feeding on garbage.

Shea said the bears were obviously lured in intentionally.

"The Chalet had actually been advertising, 'Come to Granite Park and see grizzly bears,'" Shea said. "Obviously, this was not park policy and when we saw it, we knew that this was not right and it was basically an incident waiting to happen. Four days later, it did."

Gildart and Shea both submitted reports to headquarters about what they saw and expressed their concerns.

"He made a written report, and I made a verbal report that were ignored," Gildart said.

On the evening Julie Helgeson was fatally mauled, then 27-year-old Shea was camped deep in the backcountry to work on a banded elk project. He was employed by the park as a wildlife biologist.

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As he went to sleep, he remembers the lightning storm that electrified the park.

"It was an impressive night," Shea said. "I'll never forget that night."

The next day, Shea headed to West Glacier. There, he learned the story of what happened to Koons and then to Helgeson at Granite Park Chalet the night before.

Helgeson was from Albert Lea, Minn., and came to Glacier for the summer to work in the laundry at the East Glacier Park Lodge. Her friend, 18-year-old Roy Ducat also worked in the lodge as a busboy.

The pair set out to camp 20 miles east of Trout Lake in an undesignated spot about a quarter of a mile away from the Granite Park Chalet on Aug. 12. The spot they chose was very near the path where bears trailed in to feed on the garbage left out for them.

"These were unusual situations," Shea said. "There was all this garbage there, for one thing. And this young couple came to the chalet, and they were told not to camp down there. They were told this is where the bears come through every night. But they were young and in love and both in the same sleeping bag."

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After the incident, Ducat told rangers he was awakened when Helgeson whispered to him that there was a bear nearby, and he needed to stay still.

But the bear still approached. First, it pounced onto Helgeson. Then, it pounced on Ducat, biting and clawing him. He told rangers he tried to stay still. When the bear stopped, he got up and ran to a group of nearby campers.

The bear turned its attention back to Helgeson. Ducat and the campers could hear her screams trail away as the bear dragged her into the woods.

Shea said it took people a while to find her, but eventually, she was found, alive, about 400 feet from where she and Ducat were sleeping.

Helgeson was brought back to the chalet where rangers radioed for a helicopter to come and take her 40 air miles away to the hospital in Kalispell.

However, she passed away before the helicopter arrived.

"There was nothing they could do for the girl," Shea said. "She wasn't as badly torn up as the one at the lake. But she died of blood loss and of shock."

A doctor on the scene who happened to be staying at the chalet that evening said the puncture wounds to her throat and lungs were fatal.

Later on in the night as people at the chalet were trying to process what had happened, a flashlight was shone onto the garbage below the chalet. A bear was seen feeding on the refuse.

Shea arrived on the scene on Aug. 14.

"I was basically told by the folks in Washington D.C. to kill any bears I saw coming in for the garbage," Shea said.

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By the time it was said and done, Shea killed three bears, including a sow that had two cubs. Another ranger thought it best to shoot the cubs, but botched his shot and broke the bear's jaw. Miraculously, both cubs survived through the winter before being eliminated the following summer when they returned to feed on garbage.

Identifying the bear responsible for Helgeson's death was not as easy as it had been at Trout Lake. However, Shea said he was fairly certain the sow and cubs he shot at the chalet were the culprits.

"I don't think there were human remains found, but since she had the cubs and she had blood on her claws, that was probably the bear," Shea said.

Those days following the attacks were difficult for Shea, who had an immense respect for bears despite everything that had happened. He wasn't fueled by the frustration and anger that had Gildart happily taking up arms.

Instead, he was focused on finally making the changes necessary to protect bears and people in the park.

"I found the whole thing to be pretty disagreeable," Shea said. "It wasn't really the bears' fault in the first place, and now we had to kill all of these bears. Not to shift blame, but the park management wasn't using common sense. They weren't doing things right. I wasn't angry so much as glad we learned a lot of good things, even if we learned them the hard way."

What happened to Koons and Helgeson in 1967 was tragic, but their deaths were not in vain.

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Bear management changed overnight in response to the careless mistakes that made the incident inevitable, Shea said. Rangers, including Gildart, were immediately sent out to begin collecting garbage.

What Gildart saw became the first chink in the armor he built against bears.

"Trout Lake was typical of all the other campgrounds at that time in Glacier National Park," Gildart said, "I think all the campgrounds in Glacier National Park were a mess. When the chief ranger and I flew back in there a few weeks later, we picked up an immense number, probably 17, burlap sacks we loaded into a Huey helicopter and it was all full of garbage that people had left behind."

There was a great effort to clean up the backcountry, especially the most popular areas that became riddled with trash. This was an easy, common-sense decision that Shea said was way overdue.

"Along with that, a pack-in, pack-out policy was established," Shea said. "Anybody packing anything into the backcountry had to pack it out again, particularly if it was garbage. Again, that's just common sense, but for many, many years it isn't the way it was working."

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Rangers then went through and established backcountry campgrounds to concentrate use. The new campgrounds were equipped with fire grates placed separately from established campsites where people would be required to pitch their tents. Wire cables were hung between trees for people to hang their food. Education programs were launched to inform employees and visitors about staying safe in bear country.

Finally, the park established a free backcountry permit system to limit the number of people in the backcountry, concentrate use and keep track of who was in the more secluded areas of the park.

The changes were simple, but effective.

Shea was eventually named Glacier's first-ever bear management ranger.

"That came out of the Night of the Grizzlies as well, but it wasn't as glamorous as it might sound," Shea said. "Most of the time it meant dealing with black bears in campgrounds and that meant harassing these poor black bears that were there because people were leaving garbage out."

It would still take some time until people understood just how dangerous leaving garbage out in bear country could be. Even Gildart took a few years to come to terms with what had happened and realize the bears weren't as at fault as he once believed.

"We didn't realize the extent which garbage controlled bears and habituation was kind of a new word," Gildart said. "I would say after a few years I changed in how I saw bears and how magnificent they can be and felt that if there were some way of safeguarding bears but also not having problems, that would be a good thing. And when I learned that these bear incidents were caused primarily because the backcountry areas had not been properly managed, I started to change my mind ... Those incidents would not have occurred had it not been for the presence of garbage."

Gildart continued to work at the park for seven more summers after the Night of the Grizzlies. In 1982, he wrote an article for Smithsonian regarding grizzly bears and how much influence garbage can have on bears.

Shea worked in Glacier for a total of 36 years and now leads hikes through the Old Trail Museum in Choteau and teaches adult field courses through the Glacier Institute.

For the past six years, he has been invited up to the Granite Park Chalet to speak about the Night of the Grizzlies and the major changes that took place in the days and years after.

His stories about that night 50 years ago always come back to the good that came of it. Bears aren't something to be afraid of, but they are something to be respected, especially as more and more visitors pour into their domain.

"To me, it's just a privilege to see a grizzly or a black bear, or even to be in the same place as there are grizzlies," Shea said. "When you live in a place where there's grizzlies and then you don't, there's something missing. They really keep you more alert and more aware and they make you more alive."

Follow Tribune Outdoors reporter Sarah Dettmer on Twitter @GFTrib_SDettmer