The Ladies of Le Grizz

Ever since Evie Tate won her debut Le Grizz 50-mile Ultramarathon in 2021, the Missoula-based physical therapist and endurance athlete has known she would need to summon a near-perfect performance to lower the women’s overall record, set in 1985 by Roberta “Bobbie” Pomroy. Many old-timers regarded Pomroy’s blazing time of 6 hours, 37 minutes and 53 seconds as bulletproof, enduring as it did for nearly 40 years.

And then along came Tate.

Last month, following a fall training block tailor-made for the specific demands of the Le Grizz course, the 29-year-old mountain runner returned to the start line after sharpening her leg turnover and tempo threshold. Running in front of a field that included Le Grizz veterans stomping out their 25^th finishes, Tate found precisely what she’d been looking for when she won the race outright, maintaining an average per-mile pace of 7 minutes and 52 seconds over 50 miles along the North Fork Road, a two-lane gravel corridor tracing the western edge of Glacier National Park. In doing so, she etched her name in an obscure history and rewrote the record books chronicling one of the oldest ultramarathon events in the world, lowering the women’s Le Grizz record by nearly 5 minutes with a new top time of 6 hours, 33 minutes and 3 seconds.

“That’s going to be a nationally ranked time,” said Pat Caffrey, who founded the race in 1982 and ministered its peculiar proceedings for more than three decades before retiring in 2014. Today, the race is owned and organized by the Glacier Institute, the nonprofit educational partner to both Glacier National Park and the Flathead National Forest. The organization has operated its youth outdoor education programs up the North Fork since 1983 — just one year younger than the race it inherited.

With that inheritance comes a rich tradition of obsession and dedication, both from Caffrey — who has never canceled any of the roughly 70 major running events he’s directed, despite the near-insurmountable challenges of government shutdowns, bitter cold, freezing rain, and a global pandemic — and from his committed cadre of runners, including members of the elite 10 Bears Den, a distinction awarded to runners who complete the race 10 times, and the exclusive corps of recipients of the Chief 10 Bears award, which recognizes that rare individual who finishes Le Grizz 20 times. (Upon completing 20 Le Grizz events, runners participate in a Blackfeet tribal confirmation ceremony and are given a name by a Blackfeet elder.)

Although some longtime Le Grizz devotees worried the race’s heritage would slip into hibernation under new leadership, race director Gavin Wisdom made sure its new circuitry was hardwired with plenty of institutional memory. By enlisting an ensemble cast of Le Grizz veterans to serve on the race committee, including Kathie Lang, who last month completed her 25^th Le Grizz — the most of any female Le Grizz participant  in race history — and Charles Steele, another chief who just completed his 24^th “bear,” Wisdom said he’s been able to gain valuable insight about the race’s traditions while still nurturing its development and evolution in the 21^st century.

“The traditions are still very much alive through these folks who keep coming back,” Wisdom said, adding that their approval of changes to the race allows the organization to maintain the lofty standards Caffrey set. For example, Wisdom said the 2025 running of Le Grizz will include a fundraising component to support the Glacier Institute’s scholarship program, allowing kids to attend summer programs they might not otherwise be able to afford — an addition the Le Grizz veterans cheered. “It’s really important to the entire race committee that we don’t lose sight of the classic Le Grizz experience, and we feel that having this new chapter really adds to the race’s legacy. It allows these local youth to go to a summer camp where they can experience the North Fork of the Flathead — the things that racers get to experience on race day, but which these local kids maybe never have before.”

Even if Caffrey has handed the reins off to a new generation of ultra-distance misfits, there’s no other place that he’d rather be on the second Saturday of October than at the starting line of Le Grizz, even as its course has migrated from the Hungry Horse Reservoir to its new home along the North Fork Flathead River.

“It was a very simple decision for me when I sold it — it was either watch it change or watch it die,” said Caffrey, who is a living repository of the race’s unwritten history and a father figure to its participants, which includes his daughter, Sarah, a member of the 10 Bears Den with a dozen finishes. “I’m still the guy that shoots the shotgun in the morning and gets them going, and I’ll be going back to Le Grizz every year as long as my daughter is running it, but in terms of course logistics and coordinating aid station volunteers and radios and all the myriad things that go into the race, I have pretty much transitioned out of it.”

Although part of the fun for Caffrey is upholding tradition, he said it’s almost as gratifying to see new customs take new root, and old records fall.

“The value of an ultra is learning to push your limits,” Caffrey said. “Your mind is in control, not your body, and to see someone pushing into uncharted territory after all these years is a lot of fun to watch.”

Pomroy, the previous record holder, still holds the top women’s master’s division (age 40-49) time, which she set in 1987 with a finish of 6:58:18. Now approaching 78 years old, Pomroy has swapped out her daily running routine in favor of a hiking regimen, and can reflect on a proud docket of ultrarunning accomplishments, including a 1990 course record at the Wasatch 100 Mile Endurance Run (an effort that landed her on the cover of Ultra Running Magazine) and six master’s division wins at the super-competitive Western States 100-mile Endurance Run. With 14 Le Grizz finishes, however, the homegrown Montana event remains one of her favorite races, even if she never thought her 1985 record would survive for nearly four decades.

“I never imagined it would last this long when I set it way back then,” Pomroy said recently.  

“Was it a younger runner?” she added, betraying the embers of a white-hot flame of competition that exists in most runners. For Pomroy, that flame was lit in 1982 when she ran the inaugural Le Grizz, sparking an ultrarunning career that would define the next four decades of competition. The race’s deep competitive streak notwithstanding, Pomroy said the Le Grizz fellowship often felt like one big fuzzy family, especially in the nascent days of ultrarunning.

“The first year of Le Grizz there were only 19 of us that ran it, and of course we kept running it for the next 10 years or more,” Pomroy said from her home in Montana City. At the time, ultrarunning was almost unheard of, but that didn’t deter Pomroy from training for and completing 10 100-mile ultramarathons and countless events in the 50- to 100-kilometer distance. “Nobody was doing it back then, so you form a bond with all those people. We had so much in common because we all know how hard it is to train and prepare. We could always commiserate.”

The original field of runners included Jim Pomroy, who would become Bobbie’s husband, as well as her consummate training partner.

“Forty years ago, it was pretty hard to find someone to train with,” Bobbie said. But she and Jim both lived in Helena, where they worked at the state Department of Corrections, allowing them to run together on their lunch breaks.

“Training back then, we did our long runs on Saturday,” she said. “If we were training for a 100-miler, we’d build our long runs up to 75 miles. So that would take all day. During the week, we’d do a couple of 20-milers, and then Jim and I would do shorter runs on our lunch breaks. I remember at the first Le Grizz we had de-fizzed coke, apple sauce and canned peaches. We didn’t have power bars or gels. We were just running on whatever settled in our tummies.”

“We were the cutting edge, so we were just guessing at what we were doing,” she added.

Still, nobody would have guessed that when Le Grizz debuted on Oct. 9, 1982, with 19 runners lining up at the south end of Hungry Horse Reservoir and 16 crossing the finish line, that Caffrey had created a monster that would prowl the banks of Hungry Horse for over three decades, until 2013, when the government shut down and disabled the U.S. Forest Service’s ability to issue Caffrey his event permit. Unwilling to cancel, Caffrey pored over maps in search of an alternate course and realized that the North Fork Road, which runs from Columbia Falls to the Canada border, is a county road requiring no event permit. And so, for the first time in Le Grizz history, the course was moved off Hungry Horse Reservoir, which affords scenic views of the Great Bear Wilderness and is home to grizzly bears, to Polebridge, which affords scenic views of Glacier National Park and is home to grizzly bears.

Caffrey said permanently switching the course to the North Fork was a smart move to ensure the future of Le Grizz — logistically, it is much easier to manage, and it still features gorgeous, eye-popping scenery in a wilderness environment, as well as the chance to be chased by a grizzly bear, which are the fundamental requirements of Le Grizz.

Today, ultrarunning is more popular and more competitive than ever, with advances in technology and training techniques leading to faster times. In 2021, Whitefish runner Drew Coco broke the men’s course record set by Mark Tarr in 1996, running the race in a blistering 5 hours and 20 minutes. Tarr, 59, of Columbia Falls, who has finished the race 21 times, locked down the previous course record of 5:34:38 in 1996. He has won Le Grizz outright 13 times, a remarkable streak that places him second in the world for the number of times anyone has won a single ultra-distance running event outright.

Although Tarr hadn’t completed a Le Grizz since 2013, he returns most years as a volunteer and was at the finish line to see his record fall.

Due in large part to Caffrey’s meticulous recordkeeping, the annals of Le Grizz are well-preserved, and in Wisdom, the new race director, Le Grizz has found not only a capable steward of its intricacies and idiosyncrasies, but also a talented ultrarunner committed to chronicling the event’s future.

Last month, Wisdom entrusted the race-day logistics to Glacier Institute Executive Director Anthony Nelson and Development Director Madyson Rigg so that he could run his third “bear.” By happenstance, Wisdom trains under Tate, who has coached him since 2021. Knowing that Tate was returning to Le Grizz with her sights set on the record, Wisdom was inspired to test himself.

“When I ran my first bear in 2022, I knew that Evie won it the year prior, and even though she didn’t get the course record that year, my goal was to run a time that was close to hers. I didn’t make it that year. But this year I was able to fulfill that goal,” said Wisdom, who placed third overall with a time of 6 hours, 42 minutes and 30 seconds.

Tate said she had her eye on Pomroy’s record back in 2021, but wasn’t conditioned for such a brisk pace. She even recalls a degree of incredulity registering as she crunched the numbers in her head and realized how fast Pomroy had run the race.

“The first year I ran Le Grizz, I did the math for Bobbie’s splits and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this woman is impressive,’” Tate said. “I think about how she set that time in the ’80s, and how far the science behind ultrarunning has come since then, even in the last five years, and it makes me think that her record exists in a whole other league. I feel like I have a lot of advantages that she did not have. It’s almost not the same playing field in a way.”

That didn’t dissuade her from adjusting her fall training load to focus on Le Grizz, however. With approximately 2,300 feet of elevation gain, the North Fork course remains true to the traditional elevation profile of the Hungry Horse course, with undulating gravel roads and some gentle inclines. Following a self-prescribed training plan on Le Grizz-like terrain, Tate found the near-perfect performance she needed to best Pomroy’s 39-year-old race record.

“The stars aligned for me but the room for error was very small,” Tate said. “I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room.”

After decades as a competitive ultrarunner, Pomroy’s last Le Grizz finish was in 2022, when she competed on a relay team with other Le Grizz veterans — another change that has made the race more accessible for participants who don’t wish to run the entire 50 miles.

Although Pomroy is proud of her success in the sport of ultrarunning, she’s even prouder of the contributions she and Jim made to the community. In 1989, Jim Pomroy founded the Elkhorn Endurance 100-kilometer trail race, which has since been shortened to a 50-mile distance, but remains Montana’s oldest trail ultra. The race is still held annually on the first Saturday in August. In September, Jim Pomroy died, and Bobbie lost her most reliable running, hiking and horse-riding partner. A number of Le Grizz veterans attended the memorial service, including Caffrey.

Nowadays, Pomroy keeps busy tending to her nonprofit organization, Wild About Cats Rescue and Sanctuary, and hiking to the tops of mountains around her home in Montana City. But her ultrarunning experiences, and the esoteric cast of characters who ran beside her, will always endure as sacred memories.

“They are good memories. Even though it was hard and you threw up, the good parts are really good,” she said. “Even though I mostly hike now, I still do a little run. I call it the dead man’s shuffle. I think running those long distances, they were just wonderful experiences. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

Learn more about the Le Grizz 50-mile Ultramarathon here. Learn more about the nonprofit Glacier Institute here.

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