Beth Dunagan didn’t learn how to swim or drive a car until she was in her 20s, and there’s a very good reason for that.

From the minute school let out for the summer until classes resumed each fall, Dunagan was at Sperry Chalet throughout her childhood. The annual trek to the historic backcountry chalet in Glacier National Park began when she was just 9 years old and continued until she was 19. Later she spent five summers there as an adult.

“There’s no place on earth I’d rather be,” she said.

Her aunt and uncle, Ross and Kay Luding, became the concessionaires for Sperry and Granite Park chalets in 1954 and tirelessly operated and cared for the chalets. A third generation of the Luding family, their grandson Kevin Warrington, is carrying on the family legacy as the current concessionaire of the chalets, along with his business partner, Kathy Phillips Aasheim.

Dunagan, 69, has poured her memories into a book, “Welcome to Sperry Chalet,” recently published with assistance from author Carol Buchanan, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the chalet this summer and the 60th anniversary of the Luding family’s involvement with operating the chalet.

“I’ve been telling these stories since I was 10 years old,” she said. “People would want to know about the chalet ... the crew at the chalet said, ‘Write it down.”

And so she did, filling her book with whimsical accounts about her daily chores and the glorious free time that would allow them to hike the mountains in their “back yard.”

“I cleaned chamber pots,” Dunagan recalled. “And my hands were small enough to clean the globes in the lamps. We did a lot of running back and forth to deliver messages. The four of us kids saved them millions of miles. The rest of the time we explored.”

Those four children included Dunagan, her younger sister Marcia and cousins Barb and Lanny Luding. When their chores were done, they played in the mountains.

“My aunt yodeled and my mom whistled” to call to the children, she reminisced. “Us kids would hoot back and they’d know we were OK.

“Our saving grace was we had naturalists and they taught us geology,” Dunagan said.

She remembers scraping insects off the glacial ice so that naturalist Gordon Edwards could take them back to his university for further study.

“One guy was a world authority on mosses,” she said. “We’d amaze the general public” with our knowledge gleaned from those naturalists.

Edwards taught them to rappel down cliffs.

“We were totally fearless,” she added.

One of Dunagan’s favorite stories is the mountain goats’ attraction to tubs of rinse water when the gas-powered Maytag washing machine was in use. The goats loved to lick up the water because of the phosphate from the laundry detergent, she explained.

Dunagan’s mother, Marge Somers, worked at the chalets for six seasons and was in charge of the daily laundry duty.

“The gas motor didn’t seem to bother [the goats] at all,” Dunagan writes in her book. “In fact, when she started the machine the goats would leave the glacier area and follow their trail down to the chalet ... They became so comfortable they would stand with their back feet in a tub of cold water and lean on the vibrating machines to lick the soap suds.”

“Part of our job was goat patrol,” Dunagan said with a laugh.

The goats’ daily visit to the washing machine “worked to our advantage,” she pointed out. While the goats were obsessed with splurping up the rinse water, Dunagan and her cousins would carefully pluck tufts of goat hair off the animals, which “Aunty Kay,” in turn, washed and carded into wool and then knitted socks for her husband, Ross.

The washing machine was “retired” in 1992 when the National Park Service mandated that no more waste water could be spilled on the ground or over the cliff. Since then the laundry has been hauled up and down the mountain, handled by a laundry service.

Other chapters in Dunagan’s book tell about climbing Lincoln Peak by moonlight, outhouse antics and a dancing marmot.

Dunagan never strayed far from Glacier Park. She began work for the Park Service in 1972, doing a variety of jobs through the years and retiring 24 years later.

These days Dunagan takes her grandsons to Sperry Chalet.

“We go every summer and make it an annual vacation,” she said. “Sperry is like a spiritual family home.”

“Welcome to Sperry Chalet” is available online at Amazon. It is available locally at Bookworks in Whitefish and The Bookshelf in Kalispell starting this week.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.