With visitation to the National Park System this centennial year at an all-time high, it’s no surprise I suppose that more and more people get in trouble, and some of those pay the ultimate price. Every year, Glacier National Park in Montana lures hikers, anglers, employees, and climbers to the park’s high peaks, deep lakes, and raging rivers … and some to their own demise.

This past summer, a mountain biker (an experienced U.S. Forest Service ranger) was attacked and killed just outside the park by a grizzly bear, which brings back memories of the two women fatally mauled in Glacier in a single night, many miles apart, during the summer of 1967. Their stories are retold in Randi Minetor’s chapter: Bear Bait.

This book describes each of the known fatalities (260 of them) in Glacier from 1913 to 2015 by category: from suicides to murders to climbing accidents to bear attacks. Again and again, it seems hikers take that one last step on a slick glacier, take a fall above a waterfall for their last ride, or are in the wrong place at the wrong time with an ornery bear. Sadly, employees who came to spend a fun, not deadly, summer in Glacier made many fatal steps.

There is a safety guide to the park in the book, which hopefully might make people think twice before becoming part of Minetor’s next volume.

From Lyons Press, this book is a quick read, easy to pick up and put down, and because of this seems smaller than its 240 pages. Many of the citations are perfunctory, and seem to be taken from media accounts instead of deep archival research, however. For others, very little information exists, but at times the descriptions are too brief, succinct, and I think readers want to know more about these unfortunates.