Family Remembers Rex Schowengerdt After Fatal Rockfall in Glacier National Park

A freak rockfall on one of America’s most scenic mountain roads has left a Kansas City family grieving a husband, father and grandfather who spent his life teaching them to stop and look twice at the beauty around them.

Rex Schowengerdt, 73, of Missouri, died July 16 from injuries sustained when a rock fell through the roof of the fiberglass-top Jeep he was riding in along the Rimrock section of Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. The incident occurred on July 11 in the afternoon, about a mile west of Logan Pass, along a stretch of road near the Continental Divide famous for the steep cliffs rising above its narrow lanes.

Visiting Glacier National Park on a family vacation, Schowengerdt was flown by helicopter to Logan Health, where he was treated for brain herniation, intracranial hemorrhage and traumatic brain injury. He died five days later.

Rockfall is a known hazard along sections of Going-to-the-Sun Road, but injuries and deaths from it remain rare. In August 2019, a 14-year-old girl from Utah was killed and four others were injured when falling rocks — ranging from fist-sized to 12 inches in diameter — struck their vehicle near the East Tunnel. Before that, the last fatal rockfall injury on the road occurred in 1996, also near Rimrock.

The fatal accident on an iconic byway that draws millions of visitors every year made national news. For grief-stricken family members, the public attention has made the unforeseen tragedy even more difficult to process.

Schowengerdt’s daughter, Amy Prince, said her mother, Chris, was sitting beside her husband in the back seat of the Jeep when the rock struck and her husband collapsed against her. “It wasn’t even that big of a rock,” Prince said her mother told her. “She said she saw two pebbles fall, and then it just came through the roof.” Rex’s brother-in-law, who owned the Jeep and was driving, was able to move the rock off of him with relative ease. Prince said online commenters have speculated about the size of the rock, but by every account from the family, it was not the boulder some have imagined — just dense, and heavy enough to inflict critical head trauma.

“There’s nothing that could have stopped that rock from falling,” Prince said. “It was a freak, horrible thing.”

Rex and Chris Schowengerdt had recently sold their farm and both retired, with plans to spend their time traveling. The trip to Glacier was meant to be the first chapter of that new life. Rex, a lifelong Kansas City resident who raised his family within sight of what is now Arrowhead Stadium, home to the NFL’s Chiefs, had been to Glacier once before, on a family vacation years earlier when his grandchildren were young. He was eager to return — this time with his youngest sister and her husband who had never seen the park.

“Dad was so excited to go back there — even weeks before they were scheduled to go, he was jumping around,” Prince said. “He loved that place.”

The couple had hoped to retrace the family’s earlier trip, including finding the vacation house they’d stayed in. Prince isn’t sure whether her parents ever found it before Rex’s accident.

After Glacier, the group had planned to visit other national parks before making their way to Colorado Springs, Colo. to see Prince, who had just returned to the U.S. after several years living in Australia with her husband.

The night before the trip, Rex embraced his daughter, who was visiting her parents in Kansas City. He encouraged her to keep doing what she was doing — that even when life feels messy, it works out. It was the last thing he said to her.

“He was always the big cheerleader that everything was going to be OK,” Prince said.

Prince described her father as an adventurer — a marathon runner who still ran regularly, a canoeist, a man who loved being outdoors and who had, in her words, a “warrior heart.”

“If he’d seen that rock coming, he would have thrown himself in the way,” she said. “But that didn’t happen.”

He was also, by his daughter’s account, the family’s emotional center — funny, animated, occasionally comical in how passionate and excited he got about things, but also a quiet source of faith and reassurance. “I would almost say he was my spiritual pillar,” Prince said. “He would always be the one to tell me it was going to be OK, to help me believe that when the world is falling apart, it was going to be OK. So now that our world is falling apart, I have to believe that everything is going to be OK.”

The Schowengerdt family lore is rich in outdoor adventure, including an oft-told yarn about the time Rex and his son-in-law left another relative, Al, frozen in fear on a backcountry trail. The group had encountered a mother bear and her cubs when Al, unable to locate the expensive bear spray he’d proudly brought along and bragged about earlier, panicked. It was one of the stories Rex retold in the family’s living room in the days before the trip, alongside memories of Fourth of July fireworks lit late into the Montana summer night during their earlier Glacier stay.

Despite the highlight reel of happy family memories before the recent tragic twist of fate, Rex’s death is not the first catastrophic accident the family has faced. Nearly 21 years earlier, almost to the day, Prince’s children were in a serious car wreck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, when the vehicle they were riding in flipped multiple times. One of Prince’s children nearly died, she said.

Prince, now a counselor, said the earlier trauma was an isolating experience that reshaped the family in ways people don’t always understand. “It changed our entire life,” she said. “People don’t reach out. People are afraid of it, and it leaves people isolated and lonely. It’s not that people don’t care — they don’t understand.”

She said her father was always the one insisting the family could survive hard things and still find joy afterward. “Bad things can happen to us, and we can still survive,” she said, describing his outlook. “We can still enjoy nature and enjoy the good things that we do have.”

In the days after the rockfall, the family faced the wrenching combination of grief and logistics. Rex’s lungs, strong and healthy from his running routine, had made him a candidate for organ donation, but he died the day before the scheduled surgery. His eyes and tissue were still donated; his wife later received a letter informing her that the donation had restored sight to two people, a small measure of comfort, Prince said, amid the heartbreak.

The family also had to make the difficult decision to cremate Rex, rather than transport his body back to Missouri, due to the cost.

Getting the family to Montana and back brought its own hardships, including last-minute expenses incurred during the crisis.

Chris Schowengerdt has since returned home to Missouri; the RV the couple was traveling in has been brought back as well. Further complicating a return to normalcy, Chris recently underwent a scheduled heart surgery to come off blood thinners, choosing to move forward with the procedure even amid her grief. Prince said friends have stepped in to help her mother, who is adjusting to tasks her husband always handled, from mowing the lawn to changing a flat tire.

“They’ve been together for 50 years,” Prince said. “There are things Dad would do around the house that Mom doesn’t know how to do.”

The family is planning a celebration of life on Friday, Aug. 14, at a rented house — a low-key gathering, at Chris’s request. Prince and her son plan to travel to be there.

The family has also set up a fundraiser to help cover expenses tied to the accident and its aftermath, including the cost of bringing the RV home, medical bills, funeral costs, and other unexpected financial burdens. They hope to eventually establish a memorial in Rex’s name.

For Prince, the fundraiser and the public sharing of her family’s story amount to one objective.

“I don’t want Dad forgotten, and I don’t want his life to be meaningless,” she said. “He was a valuable person. For my kids, that was Grandpa. For me and my brother, that’s Dad. And for my mom, that’s her husband of 50 years.”

She returned, as she often does, to the phrase her father used to describe how he moved through the world — one she says defined his final moments in the park he loved most.

“When you’re out there in nature and you see the beauty, you just have to stop and take a second look,” she said. “Really look. He taught my kids that too. And I’m sure my dad was doing exactly that.”

Rex Schowengerdt is survived by his wife of 50 years, Chris Schowengerdt, as well as two children, five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

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