Adventures in the wilderness can be dramatic and deadly. Glacier National Park’s death records date back to January 1913, when a man froze to death while snowshoeing between Cut Bank and St. Mary. All told, 260 people have died or are presumed to have died in the park during the first hundred years of its existence. One man fell into a crevasse on East Gunsight Peak while skiing its steep north face, and another died while moonlight biking on the Sun Road. A man left his wife and five children at the Apgar picnic area and disappeared on Lake McDonald. His boat was found halfway up the west shore wedged between rocks with the propeller stuck in gravel. Collected here are some the most gripping accounts in park history of these unfortunate events caused by natural forces or human folly. A number of books have featured Glacier National Park, but the one that will keep you up at night, or entertained on a long car trip, is Randi Minetor's "Death in Glacier National Park: Stories of Accidents and Foolhardiness in the Crown of the Continent." In addition to the predictably morbid case histories of fatalities in the park, Minetor also churns up some intriguing context. For example, Peter Kasen's tumble down a snowfield on Mount Helen was a typical kind of climbing tragedy, except that Kasen had once introduced former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at his Maplewood, Illinois, high school. Roosevelt heard about Kasen's death and how it was partially attributed to a lack of emergency gear. She wrote about it in her syndicated newspaper column, "My Day," noting "Because rescue equipment was not available, it was 12 hours before a force of 20 forest rangers and volunteers was able to carry him up the ravine. He was rushed to a hospital 80 miles away, but he died four hours later." -- Rob Chaney, The Missoulian 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. -- Patrick Cone, NationalParksTraveler.com Randi Minetor has written more than 40 books for Rowman & Littlefield imprints, including Death in Zion National Park, Death on Mount Washington, Death on Katahdin, Cursed in New York: Stories of the Damned in the Empire State , and Historic Glacier National Park , as well as five books in the National Park Pocket Guides series on Great Smoky Mountains, Everglades, Acadia, and Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks and Gulf Islands National Seashore;   Backyard Birding: A Guide to Attracting and Identifying Birds, Hiking Waterfalls New York , Scenic Routes & Byways New York , and Day Trips Hudson River Valley . She lives in Rochester, New York. Adventures in the wilderness can be dramatic and deadly. Glacier National Parks death records date back to January 1913, when a man froze to death while snowshoeing between Cut Bank and St. Mary. All told, 260 people have died or are presumed to have died