Doug Follett, Glacier National Park’s oldest ranger who was hired for his first trail-clearing job as a teenager in 1942 and remained a fixture ever since, died on March 2. He was 98 years old.

By Justin Franz

March 11, 2025

pend enough time in and around Glacier National Park, and you will soon have a Rolodex of favorite hikes, overlooks and out-of-the-way spots within its 1 million acres. But it’s unlikely anyone’s Rolodex could compare to that of Doug Follett, better known as “Ranger Doug.”

Follett, Glacier National Park’s longest-serving park ranger, died on March 2. He was 98 years old.

Follett worked as a seasonal ranger in the park for more than a half-century and was a fixture there for decades. While Follett started working in Glacier in high school in 1942, his connections to the Park go back even further to when he was an infant. In 1927, when Follett was just a year old, his father got a job on the Great Northern Railway in East Glacier Park and the family moved there from Fernie, B.C. While his father worked in the rail yard loading automobiles on flatcars for the trip over Marias Pass (U.S. Highway 2 had yet to be constructed), Follett and his mother “hob-nobbed with the high society in the Glacier Park Lodge.” During a 2010 interview, Follett said that his mother would always tell people that they were staying there for the entire season, “and then made sure they didn’t follow us out behind the Indian tipis to that little cabin we really lived in.” Follett even learned to walk in the long hallways of the hotel.

After that season in East Glacier Park, Follett’s father was reassigned and the family moved to Whitefish, where Follett would live for the rest of his life. In 1942, he got a summer job in the park clearing trails.

In 1952, Follett became a teacher at Columbia Falls High School, making about $3,200 a year. To make ends meet, he worked as a tour guide at the Hungry Horse Dam during the summer until 1961, when he became a seasonal park ranger in Glacier.

Over the decades, Follett gave countless tours, guided talks and hikes, and welcomed people at the various visitor centers around the park. In a 2012 interview, he said his most memorable experience was leading an evening talk in the 1980s with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in the crowd.

“It was the only time I ever gave the evening program with 13 secret service agents carrying machine guns,” he said. “I do hope they enjoyed themselves.”

Over the decades, Follett had plenty of run-ins with Glacier’s wildlife. One of his most memorable was a night in the 1960s when he was staying at a remote chalet in the park. He had heard some bears were feeding on a dead mule nearby, and so he decided to go check it out. Not long after leaving the chalet, he found himself face to face with two full-grown grizzly bears. He quickly turned around and ran about 100 yards and climbed atop a boulder. From the safety of his perch, he spent the better part of an hour watching the two bears play in a snowfield, sliding to the bottom and then running up to the top for another ride down.

He also saw firsthand the impacts a warming climate had on the park’s famous glaciers. In a 2010 interview with the National Parks Conservation Association, he recalled how, decades earlier, people would need ropes and ice axes to climb atop Sperry Glacier just to peek into its crevasses. One year, he noticed about six inches of red rock at the edge of the glacier’s snowfield, and he thought to himself that surely it was just an anomaly and that it would be again covered with snow the next year. But the following year, six feet of red rock was exposed at the edge of the glacier, and then 60 feet the year after that.

“I was in denial of what was happening for 20 years,” Follett said. “Al Gore wasn’t there to say, ‘Look dummy, the glacier’s not coming back for a while. Climate change is really happening. (Vice President Gore famously made a visit to Glacier in 1997 to highlight the impact of climate change on the nation’s natural landscape). I know a lot of us men are slow learners — but isn’t that something? To be so certain that the world we had always known was going to stay that way and that the glacier wasn’t coming back? I walked with that glacier hand-in-hand for half a mile as it melted back, yet I was in denial every day.”

“So what do I tell people today?” Follett continued. “We are in a world that is in constant change. What was yesterday is not today and will not be tomorrow.”

While most people visit Glacier Park for the incredible landscape, Follett said it was the people who brought him back season after season.

“I was never rich enough to travel the world,” Follett said in 2012. “But in Glacier Park, the world came to me.”

In later years, Follett worked less, but he still came out for special events at the park and led the occasional hike. In 2020, a documentary about him and his time in the park was made.

As for his favorite spot in the park — a question he got countless times in his six decades as a Glacier Park ranger — it was hard to pick just one. But if you pushed him for an answer, he would say that Two Medicine Lake, where he worked on a trail crew back in 1942, was on the short list of favorites.

“You can get a jug of what suits you and sit on the beach there and drink ‘till you die,” he said. “Then you know you’ve lived a good life.”

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