Trigger: The backcountry trail horse that wouldn't die

More than 30 years ago, Whitefish dentist and backcountry enthusiast Gary Dalen took a paint horse named Trigger on a backcountry ride to Trout Lake in Glacier National Park.

Dalen, along with his son Jeff and his son’s friend Little Joe Glickman, fished the lake in a rubber raft. The wind blew the raft to one end of the lake, leaving the boys’ shoes at the other end.

So Dalen tied their horses together and rode up to get the boys’ shoes. Along the way, one horse tried to pass another in the string, making a big mess. The horses scattered, and Dalen was left trying to sort it all out.

At some point in the melee, Trigger was pulled into a tree by the other horses as they raced around a sharp bend in the trail, leaving him in rough shape. Lying prone in the trail, the horse couldn’t even lift its head, Dalen recalled in “Backcountry Hoofbeats,” the newsletter of the Back Country Horsemen of the Flathead.

Dalen thought for sure his prize horse was going to die. It was getting late, so he left Trigger behind and called Park rangers about the problem.

The rangers went in the next day and got the horse up, but when he tried to walk, Trigger kept falling down. The rangers offered to shoot the horse and blow up the carcass with explosives — a gruesome but necessary task when a horse dies back in grizzly country.

A dead horse will draw bears from miles around, creating an extreme hazard for hikers and riders who might come upon the bears while feeding on the carcass. Bears are very protective around kills and will not hesitate to attack a perceived intruder.

Dalen said OK, but he wanted to give Trigger one last chance, He rode in with some pain killers, gave the horse a dose, and lo and behold Trigger made it out on his own.

Trigger’s story continues, with some political fame. Tim Sullivan, who packed for Glacier Park for more than 40 years, bought Trigger from Dalen to use as a trail horse. Sullivan rode from 600 to 800 miles a year while he worked for the Park, primarily on Trigger.

“He was one of the top five horses I ever had,” Sullivan recalled last week. “He was a good looking horse and a good travel horse. He had a lot of sense. I rode him a lot of miles.”

When former First Lady Laura Bush visited Glacier Park in 2004, plans were made for Bush and her friends to ride into the Belly River area. Sullivan recalled asking the women who was the best horsemen.

“’They said, ‘We’re all from Texas, we’re all good horsemen,’” Sullivan recalled.

That turned out to be incorrect, Sullivan said. None of them were good horsemen, so Sullivan put the First Lady on Trigger, whose name by then had been changed to Camas, and the great horse led her down into the Belly River without a hitch.

Trigger lived a long and productive life. When he was 21, the Park Service sold the paint to a private party for $1,100 — a hundred dollars more than it paid for him about 15 years earlier.

Trigger lived to be more than 30. A family in Kalispell had him in his final years. Trigger died in 2013.