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Michael and Louisa Allgeier visit with Dr. Chuck Harris at the Grand Teton Medical Clinic on Thursday after Louisa suffered from a cornial abrasion on her eye. JENNA SCHOENEFELD / NEWS&GUIDE

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It started with a bump — a single pockmark and then another.

At first Chuck Harris wasn’t sure what caused the few red marks  on the 19-year-old man’s body. But the next day, when the patient came back to his walk-in medical clinic in Grand Teton National Park, Harris had no doubts.

Chicken pox, he told the man whose face and body had erupted in red bumps.

Chicken pox is a rare diagnosis in adults these days. Most people fight the itchy disease as children or have been vaccinated.

Still, nothing surprises Harris.

For the 26 years the Grand Teton Medical Clinic has been open, he has run it.

Situated near Jackson Lake Lodge, the clinic serves visitors, seasonal park employees and residents of communities in Moran and Buffalo Valley. About half the patients are tourists, and the other half are residents or seasonal workers.

This summer the clinic served its 30,000th patient.

Harris, a physician assistant, has seen it all at the clinic.

“Everything from fishhooks to heart attacks,” he said.

Harris has treated patients for bear bites, chest pains, sprained ankles and maladies not normally found in the area, including Lyme disease and poison oak and even malaria.

One man came in with a scratched eye from a shark attack — an inflatable shark stored in the closet of his RV popped out, and the fin hit his face.

The clinic, owned by Dr. Brent Blue, who also owns Emerg-A-Care in Jackson, is a concessionaire of the park. The agreement requires Blue to keep the clinic open and running all summer, regardless of customer flow. In 1988, the year of the fires in Yellowstone National Park, there were hardly any patients other than the occasional firefighters needing treatment.

Harris started his career in Grand Teton National Park as a seasonal climbing ranger from 1979 to 1982. He wasn’t the strongest climber, but with a background in emergency medicine, including working in Yosemite National Park, he often attended serious rescues.

Backcountry rescues were changing at the time. Instead of simply getting people out of the wilderness, rangers were stabilizing fractures and treating patients with IVs. The increased treatment helped save lives, Harris said. It also fostered his interest in medicine.

Harris, who had a degree in wildlife biology and forestry, went back to school at the University of Utah to become a physician assistant.

There isn’t much the clinic hasn’t seen over the years. It is the variety that has kept Harris interested.

Over the years the clinic has expanded its service. Open May through October, it offers X-rays and a pharmacy and can even offer cardiac enzyme testing.

Everything offered in the clinic Harris can do. Part of what has kept him with the job the past 26 years is the variety. There are no radiologists on staff, so he takes X-rays himself. The clinic has its own darkroom to develop images.

Harris never knows what is going to happen when he arrives at work. Such as chicken pox on July 12. The young man from Moldavia didn’t fully understand chicken pox. He knew he couldn’t sleep because of the itching. Harris helped him look up the disease on the Internet and read about it in Russian.

The man could return to his job of cleaning cabins at Colter Bay soon, but Harris warned it would be more than a week before the last pockmark left. He asked the patient to come back the next week, just to let the clinic staff now how he was doing.

Harris was curious. Plus, he knew he would be there, waiting for and treating patients.