He was a poet, a storyteller and an educator, entertaining every one from young tourists to the future president of the United States.
He was the welcoming, smiling face of Glacier National Park for decades.
G. Douglas Follett — Ranger Doug, as many, many, people knew him — died on blue-sky day March 2, 2025 in Whitefish with his family by his side.
He was 98.
In a 2019 interview he said he couldn’t afford to see the world, so he got in a job in Glacier National Park.
“I’d have the world come to see me, well ... Glacier, but I was standing in the way!” he said with a big grin.
He was always quick with a joke, whether they bombed or not.
“If you can’t do quality, do quantity,” he joked on a hike through the woods with a group of tourists.
Follett said he started his career of entertaining visitors on the deck of the East Glacier Park Depot in 1927. His father worked for the Great Northern Railway and the Blackfeet would hold the infant Follett in their arms as they greeted passengers in their white buckskin garb as the tourists exited the train.
“My mother hated the Blackfeet,” he joked. “They’re supposed to steal white kids and they kept bringing me back.”
Joking aside, Follett embodied the term “public servant.” He was an interpretative ranger in Glacier for a whopping 58 years, retiring at age 93 in 2019.
He taught history at Columbia Falls High School for 35 years and worked 11 years as a tour guide at the Hungry Horse Dam, and one year on a blister rust crew back in 1942 for the Park Service.
Follett was born to Isabel Boardman and George Follett at the end of March in 1926. In 1927, he and his mother joined George in Whitefish eventually moving to East Glacier for the summer, where his father would help run the Great Northern train depot. Doug learned to walk in the East Glacier Lodge when they went to watch the trains arrive, hob-knobbing with visiting high society as they mingled with Glacier’s frontier peoples. So began Doug’s “seasonal life” in Glacier National Park, his obituary noted.
The family returned to Whitefish and Follett grew up hiking and fishing in the surrounding hills with the freedom allowed children of the 1930s to roam and explore from dawn to dusk.
The small-town boy was most at home running wild in the wilderness knowing that dinner would always be waiting for him. He attended school in Whitefish, graduating in 1944 and then joined the United States Air Force. After World War II ended, he declined the offer from the Air Force to fly him home to Montana and instead hitch-hiked from North Carolina back to Whitefish. He never stepped into an airplane again, his obituary noted.
In the 2019 interview he recalled being asked to give a campground program to George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara back when Bush was vice president in 1983. The couple stayed in a tent in the Glacier.
Follett had prepared absolutely nothing for the event. He completely winged it. Though he did know the Bushes went to Hidden Lake fishing and they’d caught nothing.
So he started his talk, pointing out that there are three main questions he hears from visitors. One is, “where’s the bathroom?” The second is “where can I see a bear?” and the third is, “where can I catch a fish?”
He paused and looked at the Bushes.
The last question you don’t answer truthfully, not even to your mother, he said.
“They didn’t take you to Hidden Lake did they?” Follett asked the Bushes. Everyone knows the fishing is lousy at Hidden Lake.
He then told the Bushes he’d take them to his secret fishing hole.
Then he looked at the Secret Service guys that were watching over the talk.
“But I won’t take these guys with you,” he said. “They can’t keep a secret.”
The joke brought a roar from the Bushes.
Bill Schustrom, also a longtime naturalist-ranger for Glacier, worked with Follett for decades.
In particular, the two paired up on boat tours aboard the DeSmet on Lake McDonald from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. On one tour, the boat ran out of fuel. A friend, Pete Hammond, lived across the lake at Kelly’s Camp and saw a worried Follett on the deck.
Hammond has a tram of his own and slid up to the DeSmet, pushing it along back across the lake and they glided it back into dock as if nothing had happened.
“I don’t think the people on the boat realized there was anything terribly different,” Schustrom recalled.
Schustrom, a talented speaker himself, would often follow the next day after Follett gave a talk at the Lake McDonald Lodge the night before.
“We hope you’re half as good as the guy last night,” they’d say.
“He was a phenomenon,” Schustrom said.
Schustrom recalled Follett would often work all day on the boat and then do a talk at the lodge auditorium. He wrote and recited original poetry on his talks.
“His poetry was second to none,” Schustrom said. Follett had a great voice and was a natural performer.
In 2020 young filmmakers Celine Francois, Kayla Borkovec, and co-directors Claire Jantzen and Sara Nell made a 17-minute documentary on him.
“He was such a wonderful person to meet,” Nell said at the time. “He put his faith in four California girls.”
Follett retired in 2019, as the 70-mile a day commute from his Whitefish Lake home to Glacier became a bit much. Plus, there was the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and he was worried about not just catching the disease, but spreading it to his family.
“What the grizzly bears failed to do in 60 years the virus did in 60 days,” he quipped about the pandemic.
A celebration of Follett’s life is March 30 at 1 p.m. at Whitefish Grouse Mountain Lodge, Continental Divide Room.
