Gerard Byrd has had quite the ride over the past 42 years.

The Columbia Falls Public Schools and West Glacier contract bus driver has driven some 1.2 million miles on one of the worst roads in Montana, delivering students from their homes to school and back from Pinnacle, Nyack, West Glacier and the Canyon through sleet, rain, hail, snow and rockfall.

Sometimes all of those in the same day.

Byrd retired last week and students, staff and the greater West Glacier community came out to bid him farewell on June 17, his last day picking up students at the school.

“Words aren’t enough,” Byrd said as he got off the bus to greet the throng of supporters. “I couldn’t have done it without my beautiful wife (Loretta).”

Loretta Byrd said there were plenty of days early on when the weather was simply awful but he still did the route.

“There were times he’d pick them up and find out school was closed and have to take them back home,” she recalled.

Byrd’s route is like no other in the county. It weaves through part of the John F. Stevens Canyon along the Middle Fork of the Flathead, where one mistake could send a bus hundreds of feet down into the river or a rock can easily come off the surrounding cliffs and tear into the bus.

The route also goes through the Bad Rock Canyon with its twists and turns and notoriously slick surface as it runs within a few feet of the mainstem of the Flathead River.

But he never had an accident.

He recalled one time watching a crack widening in a huge rock above the highway. 

He called Tom Bengtson, who was the Nyack Road supervisor at the time for the Montana Department of Transportation, and told him he thought the rock would soon come down.

“The next morning it was on the road blocking the inside lane,” Byrd said.

As far as the weather, he said he never feared it, though it was spooky at times. The forecasts and technology and alerts got better over the years and when it would get too bad he wouldn’t go out. Often he’d check the roads even before the internet alerts.

As a contractor, Byrd owned the bus and was responsible for its upkeep and maintenance. Actually, he owned two buses. One as a spare and for field trips.

He started out unsure if it was the career for him. 

His brother Jim Byrd was killed in a tragic bus accident in 1984 on U.S. 2 bringing home the Whitefish wrestling team from a dual in Browning. The bus collided head-on with the pup trailer of a jackknifed fuel-tanker in the eastbound lane of an icy U.S. 2 near Essex.

But Gerard gave the job, which in the first year was with a local company and not a contract gig, a test drive.

“It was a good fit,” he said. The pay was just $25 a day.

The next year he bought a small bus, a 35-seater, and started as a contract driver.

Claudette Byrd-Rinck, his niece, recalled not just riding the bus everyday, but helping clean it on more than one occasion.

Back when using chewing tobacco was common and legal among youths, he used to tell them if they were man enough to chew, they were man enough to swallow the tobacco juice, she recalled.

Gerard Byrd confirmed that tale. 

“They never spit on the bus again,” he said.

He kept discipline on his bus. Just the other day he had some unruly youths cleaning up a mess on the bus as half the junior high watched.

But he was also kind and safety conscious, he said.

“I always greeted the kids with a 'good morning,'” he said.

The route will have a new bus driver next year in Vince Dalimata, whose family has lived in Nyack for generations. 

Does Byrd have any advice?

“When you think it’s the worst, it will get better,” he said.

    Gerard Byrd greets West Glacier students as he did his last pickup at the school on Tuesday. (Chris Peterson/Hungry Horse News)
  

    Youngster Maeve Furlong holds up a sign thanking Gerard Byrd for his service. (Chris Peterson/Hungry Horse News)