On a Friday night in January 1997, Patrick went out and drank a few beers, his friends said, and on the way home apparently fell asleep at the wheel, entangling his pickup truck in barbed wire. A sheriff's deputy gave Patrick a citation for illegal possession of alcohol.

"Under school rules, that would have meant he would be suspended from the team for the rest of the season," his mother said. "He was such a perfectionist, always harder on himself than on anyone else, he felt he had let his family and teammates down." He did not discuss the situation with his parents. The next morning, the day of a big game, alone in his bedroom, Patrick shot himself.

"Teenagers don't live for tomorrow, they live for today," Mrs. Spaulding said.

At Stevensville High School, the guidance counselor, Linda Mullan, was concerned about how other students would respond to Patrick's death and was worried about the possibility of copycats. Many students own guns and hunt, often starting in junior high school. "Guns and hunting are a rite of passage in Montana," Ms. Mullan said.

Two seniors in the same class as Patrick were so distraught by his death that they turned down appointments to the Air Force Academy, preferring to concentrate on trying to heal the wounds of grief among their classmates and prevent any further tragedy, Ms. Mullan said.

A few families of those who have taken their own lives have begun organizing themselves to better understand what happened. Pat Kendall, whose son, Josh, shot himself in the Blue Mountains in 2000, when he was 23, has opened a resource center with a lending library in a small house in Missoula, at the northern end of the valley. She has also helped get the Missoula County Health Department to start a suicide prevention program, the first of its kind in the area.

What Mrs. Kendall has come to believe is that her son probably had bipolar disorder. When he finally went to a doctor, not long before he killed himself, the doctor, who was not a trained psychiatrist, prescribed the antidepressant Prozac. But Prozac can make mood swings worse for some people with bipolar disorder. Mrs. Kendall believes that in a region with few mental health resources, Josh's problem was mistaken for depression.

'A Mercy Killing'

Bill Tipps and his wife, Louise, moved to Stevensville from a suburb of Las Vegas to be close to their adult son, Dennis Tipps, who was the high school football coach and onetime police chief.