At first glance, it was nothing out of the ordinary. An unmarked manila envelope, tucked into a box of childhood mementos. An old report card, maybe, or a misplaced legal document.  

The last thing Zach Block expected to find when he slid the pages from their covering was a historical artifact of sorts.  

Spread across hundreds of pages was a memoir, typed up more than a decade prior by Zach’s paternal grandfather, Dan Block. Zach had no idea how the pages ended up in a box of his own belongings, gathering dust in the back corner of the garage, nor could he ask Dan, who died in 2016 at the age of 96.  

He settled in and began to read. 

The story that unraveled was one Zach had only heard in the broadest of strokes. After serving in the military during World War II, Dan had packed up his wife, Gerane, and moved West, to a secluded cabin on the North Fork of the Flathead River. There, the couple scraped out a living for five years by fishing, trapping and farming mink while Dan worked for the U.S Forest Service. They continued to spend summers at the cabin as Dan studied wildlife biology at the University of Montana. He even focused his graduate studies on the bull trout that swam up the North Fork to spawn every autumn. 

The manuscript colored in the facts Zach had heard in passing, giving rise to a new understanding of his grandparents and their ties to the North Fork.  

“OK, this isn’t just my grandfather’s notes,” Zach remembered thinking. “This isn’t just my grandfather’s story. This is a piece of history.”   

Over the next year, Zach worked with historians and editors to posthumously publish Dan’s memoir, further preserving the history his grandfather had encoded in those pages. The resulting book, titled “Trail Creek: A North Fork Saga,” is part nature journal, part autobiography, weaving together Dan’s accounts of daily life on the North Fork with his musings on the nature of wilderness.  

After securing his family’s blessing to pursue the project, Zach said his first step was to contact the North Fork Landowners Association, which maintains a collection of oral and written histories about 19th and 20th century homesteaders in the North Fork. Lois Walker, a longtime Polebridge resident who oversees the collection, agreed that Dan’s writings were an extraordinary find.   

“Most people who were homesteaders up here didn’t bother writing their history down. They just lived it,” said Walker. “That’s what makes it so special, that he did record it.”   

Walker helped Zach pick through the manuscript for spelling errors and pointed him toward records that corroborated his grandfather’s tales. One story, in which a rogue black bear repeatedly broke into the Blocks’ kitchen while Gerane was home alone, had even been reported by national news outlets at the time. A local game warden shot the bear while visiting Gerane one night.  

“When [the bear] fell, his head was about two feet from the door,” Gerane told Dan when he returned home from a multi-week hitch with the Forest Service.  

A rug made from the bear’s hide became a much-loved fixture of the Block family home. Zach recalled playing near the animal’s open maw when he and his brother visited their grandparents’ home in Dillon. 

“I didn’t know any of the stories,” said Zach of the book. “It was all a surprise, but none of it was shocking.” 

Zach remembered his grandfather as a stern but loving outdoorsman, with a passion for the teachings and rhetoric of famed environmentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. He eventually received a doctorate in wildlife technology from the University of Montana and became a much-beloved professor at the University of Montana-Western, where he melded traditional teaching methods with outdoor experiences. 

Gerane, meanwhile, was an accomplished artist with a penchant for unique decor items. In addition to the bear rug, the Blocks’ home in Dillon featured a suit of armor and an indoor waterfall.  

Reading Dan’s memoir, Zach saw hints of Gerane’s whimsy peeking through. At only 17 years old, she accepted both Dan’s proposal of marriage and his pitch to move out West, despite having little outdoors experience herself. 

“Her priority in packing for the trip West was her party dresses,” ribbed Dan in the opening of his manuscript.  

But Gerane proved herself an adept survivalist. She hauled buckets of water from the nearby stream, fished in the river and helped care for the couple’s burgeoning mink business, all the while maintaining an aura of indisputable glamor.   

Photographs taken by Dan and preserved in a thick leatherbound scrapbook depict a young woman with perfectly coiffed curls and pressed blouses, smiling as she cradles a freshly caught trout or posed on a fence post with the peaks of Glacier National Park in the background. 

Zach tucked a few dozen of the photographs Dan took into the book. It was one of the few changes he made to his grandfather’s work. The writing was already immaculate, and Zach said he wanted to preserve Dan’s own interpretations of his life in the Montana backwoods. 

"The summers were always too short, the winters too long,” wrote Dan. “It was not a hostile environment, just one that belonged there. For those who had learned not to fight it but to adapt, there were rewards, not in wealth but in the personal satisfaction of having learned to become a part of the land.” 

Copies of “Trail Creek: A North Fork Saga” are available for purchase at The Bookshelf in Kalispell. 

Reporter Hailey Smalley can be reached at 758-4433 or [email protected].