Larry Kimble Disappearance

A Receipt on the Dashboard:

The Disappearance of Larry Kimble in Glacier National Park

A Missing Man and an Incomplete Record

Glacier National Park keeps its dead in ledgers. Park records begin in January 1913, when a man named Joe Prince froze to death while snowshoeing between Cut Bank and St. Mary. By the end of 2013, 260 people had died or were presumed to have died within the boundaries (Hanners). The ledger also holds a smaller and stranger category: people who entered the park and did not leave, and whose remains were never recovered. Larry Kimble, a man from western Michigan, belongs to that category. His case is documented only in fragments, and the fragments do not entirely agree. That is a reason to set down carefully what is known and to mark where the record is thin.

Arrival in the Spring of 2003

According to the Flathead Beacon, Kimble was 40 years old and lived in Dorr, Michigan, a small town in Allegan County. The paper reports that he arrived in the Glacier area in the spring of 2003 and that his family reported him missing on June 20, having not seen him for six weeks (Scott). A national database of missing persons, compiled from law enforcement submissions, agrees on his hometown. It lists his date of birth as June 28, 1963, and gives the investigating agency as the Allegan County Sheriff's Office, case number 8917-03 ("Larry Thomas Kimble"). By that date of birth he was 39 when he disappeared and turned 40 shortly afterward, which probably explains why the press reports give 40.

The sources offer a modest physical description. The database lists him at six feet to six feet one inch and 150 to 160 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. A 2019 magazine account calls him tall and slender and adds that he wore glasses (Distinctly Montana Magazine 26). No source consulted for this article identifies his occupation or his reasons for traveling west, and none quotes his family. The omission is notable. The surviving record describes a vehicle and a terrain far more fully than it describes a man.

The Truck at Rocky Point

The physical evidence is a pickup truck. The database describes it as a 1998 GMC ("Larry Thomas Kimble"). Both the Beacon and the Bigfork Eagle place it at the Rocky Point Trailhead near the Fish Creek Campground, on the western shore of Lake McDonald (Scott; Hanners). The Hungry Horse News likewise places his last known whereabouts in the Fish Creek and Rocky Point area (Peterson). Three independent accounts of the location is as much corroboration as this case offers.

The Beacon adds a detail found nowhere else in the sources consulted: a park entrance receipt dated May 29 sat on the dashboard (Scott). If the receipt was Kimble's, it places him at the park gate roughly three weeks after the last family contact the Beacon describes. It also suggests that the truck had stood at the trailhead for as long as three weeks before his family raised the alarm. The Eagle says only that the truck was found in June 2003 (Hanners). The Beacon's wording implies that the truck was located after the family's report, which fits that timeline. Neither paper says who found it.

Nothing in the surviving sources describes what the truck contained. No account mentions a backcountry permit, a planned route, or a destination, and none mentions a note. The Rocky Point trail is a short and popular walk, and the lakeshore and forest beyond it are not. This article does not speculate about what happened, and the record does not support doing so.

The Terrain

The country around Rocky Point is difficult to search. Chris Peterson of the Hungry Horse News observes that Lake McDonald "drops off steeply" from the shore at that point (Peterson). A person who entered the water there would have gone quickly into deep water. A person who walked into the forest west of the lake would have entered thick timber, with windfall and brush that hide a body or a person on foot from searchers a short distance away.

Peterson also supplies a useful contrast. A hiker named Yi-Jien Hwa disappeared above Avalanche Lake in 2008, and his remains were not found until four years later (Peterson). Glacier does eventually give up some of its missing. For Kimble, however, the terrain was altered before it could be searched thoroughly, and that matters a great deal to the story.

A Dry Summer and a Great Fire

The weather that early summer was unusual in a way that mattered. Dennis Divoky, the park's fire ecologist, recalled that the first three weeks of June 2003 brought about two and a half inches of rain. Then, on June 23, the rain stopped and did not return until mid-September (Franz). The days between the family's June 20 report and the first week of fire were the last in which the country was green and the search could proceed under ordinary conditions.

The fire came in July. On July 23, the Huckleberry Lookout spotted the Robert Fire along the North Fork of the Flathead River, outside the park. By the next day it was advancing toward the Lake McDonald valley, and an estimated 3,000 people were evacuated, including residents of Apgar and park headquarters (Franz). A federal situation report from August 2 recorded the fire at roughly 21,000 acres, with 996 personnel assigned and evacuations in effect for West Glacier, Lake Five, and park headquarters (National Interagency Coordination Center). On August 10 the fire ran up Howe Ridge, west of the lake, and burned about 7,000 acres in four hours, forcing a second evacuation of the Lake McDonald Lodge area (Franz). By the season's end the Robert Fire had burned 57,570 acres in the park and the adjoining Flathead National Forest, and all the fires of 2003 together burned more than 136,000 acres in the park, roughly 13 percent of its land (Franz).

Richard Hanners of the Hungry Horse News drew the connection to Kimble directly. He wrote that the Robert Fire "may have made finding the remains of Larry Kimble, 40, impossible," because the area where Kimble may have disappeared "completely burned over" after the fire crossed into the park (Hanners). Peterson, writing five years later, reached the same conclusion, noting that wildfires had scorched the terrain where Kimble may have wandered (Peterson). Fire does not necessarily destroy remains, but it removes the landmarks, the vegetation, and the scent that searchers and dogs rely on, and it makes a burned slope dangerous to work for months. Whatever searching was done in the weeks after Kimble's truck was found took place in the narrow interval before this happened, and no source consulted describes its extent.

How Glacier Counts Its Missing

Kimble's name appears on lists, and the lists differ in ways worth understanding. Hanners counts twelve people through 2013 as missing and presumed dead, beginning with two men who drowned in Lake McDonald in July 1923 and were never found. The count also includes the two hikers who vanished in 1924 between Granite Park and Lake McDonald, and a man lost on Mount Brown in 1933. In his list Kimble is the final entry before 2013 (Hanners). The Beacon, by contrast, speaks of a "small guild, a half-dozen in all," classified as "lost, never found," and includes Kimble among them (Scott). The difference seems to lie in definition. Hanners includes people presumed drowned, while the Beacon appears to count only those who vanished on land. Peterson cites a published study of park deaths in support of a figure of at least a dozen missing since 1913 (Peterson). Anyone using these totals should state which definition they follow.

The Discrepancies

A responsible account must record where the sources diverge. Four problems stand out.

First, the name. The Beacon, the Eagle, and the missing persons database spell it Kimble. The 2019 Hungry Horse News article and the Distinctly Montana magazine spell it Kimball. Three sources against two favor Kimble, and the database, which draws on a sheriff's case file, carries the most weight, but the variation shows how loosely the case has been recorded.

Second, the dates. The database lists him as missing since April 1, 2003, and last seen by family in April (Larry Thomas Kimble). The Beacon implies a last family contact in early May, six weeks before June 20, and places him at the park gate on May 29. Hungry Horse News says he disappeared in May. These may reflect different definitions, such as the last contact with family, the last known sighting, and the date of the report, but the sources do not say so.

Third, the single-source details. The June 20 report date, the six-week interval, and the dashboard receipt appear only in the Beacon. They are specific enough to suggest that the reporter had access to a primary source, probably park officials or the family, but they have not been cross-checked against a second document.

Fourth, the absence of primary records. This article could not locate a park incident report, a sheriff's file, or a published academic study of the case. A book on deaths in the park, cited secondhand through Peterson, may contain more. A researcher with access to the park archives at West Glacier or to the Allegan County Sheriff's file would be able to resolve most of these questions.

An Open Entry

The Kimble case lacks the features that give other disappearances in the park their public life. There is no famous search, no federal inquiry, and no dramatic last sighting. What exists is a truck at a trailhead, a receipt on a dashboard, a lake with a steep drop-off, and a forest that burned within weeks of the first search. The fire was a natural event of great scale, and it passed over the one place where an answer might have been found.

For a historian the case is useful mostly as a warning. Public memory of a disappearance depends on what was written at the time, and when little was written, details drift. Names change, dates slip, and a man's life shrinks to a vehicle description. Larry Kimble was a 39-year-old man from Dorr, Michigan, whose family looked for him for six weeks before asking the park for help. The most that can be said with confidence is that he drove to Glacier in the spring of 2003 and was never seen again.

Works Cited

Distinctly Montana Magazine. Summer 2019, p. 26. Distinctly Montana, https://digital.distinctlymontana.com/i/1126990/27. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.

Franz, Justin. "Glacier's Big Burn." Flathead Beacon, 14 Aug. 2013, https://flatheadbeacon.com/2013/08/14/glaciers-big-burn/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.

Hanners, Richard. "Glacier Park Records: The Missing and the Dead." Bigfork Eagle, 13 Aug. 2014, https://bigforkeagle.com/news/2014/aug/13/glacier-park-records-the-missing-and-the-dead-15/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.

"Larry Thomas Kimble." Doe Network, case file 6117DMMI, https://www.doenetwork.org/cases/software/mp-main.html?id=6117dmmi. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.

National Interagency Coordination Center. Incident Management Situation Report. 2 Aug. 2003. National Wildfire Coordinating Group, https://famprod.nwcg.gov/batchout/IMSRS_from_1990_to_2022/2003/20030802IMSR.pdf. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.

Peterson, Chris. "At Least 12 People Have Gone Missing in Glacier Park, and Were Never Found." Hungry Horse News, 24 July 2019, https://hungryhorsenews.com/news/2019/jul/24/at-least-12-people-have-gone-missing-in-10/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.

Scott, Tristan. "Lost, Never Found." Flathead Beacon, 6 Aug. 2014, https://flatheadbeacon.com/2014/08/06/lost-never-found/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.