Both women, Julie Helgeson, 19, of Albert Lea, Minnesota, and Michele Koons, 19, of San Diego, California, died of their injuries.

The frightened campers stayed in the trees for more than two hours and ran to the nearest ranger station at dawn, where they reported the attack.

Although a gas-fired incinerator had been installed in 1966, it was inadequately sized, and the caretaker resumed dumping garbage in the gully behind the Chalet shortly after opening for the summer season.

[9]: 40–41  The campground at Trout Lake "looked like a battlefield strewn with K rations", according to Olsen;[10] rangers took nearly twenty bags of garbage out of the site by helicopter a few weeks later.

[5]: 50  However future events would show grizzly attacks to become more common, as Olson explains, because of increased human presence in wilderness areas and decreased habitat for bears to live in, reaching a critical tipping point in the summer of 1967.

[5]: 55–58 As a result of the attacks, the first modern bear management policies were implemented, installing bear-proof garbage cans, separating campsite cooking areas from sleeping areas, stringing wire cables to allow campers to hang their food, and establishing a permitting process to track and limit the number of campers in the park.

"[16] The narrative pacing and graphic descriptions were said to influence later genre fiction, including First Blood (David Morrell, 1970), The Rats (James Herbert, 1974), and Off Season (Jack Ketchum, 1980).