BY AARON TEASDALE
MISSOULA, MONTANAKyler Alm froze. A branch snapped. Something was in the forest behind him. Alm, a 19-year-old hunter with a permit for a bull elk, nocked an arrow in his bow and waited. The tawny fur of a moving animal appeared through the trees, but something wasn’t right. Alm, who’d come alone into the woods, didn’t see antlers.
A moment later, the young hunter, two miles from his truck in the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana, came face to face with the largest bear he’d ever seen. Unlike the black bears that frequent the woods here, this one didn’t run. Because everyone knows grizzlies don’t live here—they haven’t inhabited the Bitterroots in 70 years—Alm did not have bear spray.
The young man’s eyes met the bear’s. The large bruin with a telltale silvery stripe behind its shoulder, common on grizzlies, held Alm’s stare.
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“Hey bear, hey bear,” Alm called out tremulously. The bear huffed and stood its ground. Alm yelled as loudly as his lungs allowed. Still the bear stared.
Fearing a charge, Alm aimed his nine-millimeter pistol at the ground in front of the bear and fired three shots. The animal retreated a few yards, stopped, and again turned to face the young man, huffing repeatedly. Alm backed up. But the ground was slick from rain, and he slipped and fell backward. That’s when he heard enormous paws crashing across the ground.
“I thought for sure the bear was coming at me,” Alm says.
To his great fortune it wasn’t. Alm leapt to his feet and saw the back of the animal lope away into the forest.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten out of the mountains that fast,” Alm says about the retreat to his truck.
Four days later, a motion-activated camera in the Bitterroot foothills captured a grizzly helping itself to the fruit of an apple tree in a rural yard. The two incidents splashed across newspapers in Missoula, the nearby city of 80,000, where residents aren’t accustomed to grizzly bears in the hills around town.
A remote camera captures a grizzly bear foraging for whitebark pinecones in Wyoming's Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.PHOTOGRAPH BY DREW RUSH, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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“Right now people have kind of a false security,” Montana game warden Justin Singleterry, who investigated Alm’s bear encounter, told the Missoulian in October.
“Grizzly bears are re-occupying significant areas of their [former] range,” says veteran bear biologist Chris Servheen of the steadily increasing grizzly populations in the Northern Rockies. “So don't expect that just because you’re outside [Glacier] or Yellowstone that you’re not going to see a grizzly bear.” Servheen recently retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where he oversaw grizzly management in America for 35 years, and he insists people and bears can get along—if people take proper precautions.
As grizzly bears expand their range in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming into places where they haven’t been seen in a century or more, they’re increasingly encountering humans. Things intensified last summer as trails and campgrounds across the region flooded with inexperienced tourists seeking refuge in the outdoors during the coronavirus pandemic. Grizzly attacks spiked. Bear managers were inundated with calls about grizzlies getting into garbage, chickens, and other draws. Dispersing grizzlies even came unexpectedly close to neighboring states—a remote camera in Wyoming captured a grizzly only 20 miles from the Utah border and a radio collared bear in Idaho nearly roamed into Oregon and Washington. Ultimately, 2020 offered a nerve-jangling look at the challenges and complex future of grizzly bears in America.
How many bears are enough?
Grizzly bears occupy a conflicted, toothy corner of the American psyche—we revere them even as they haunt our nightmares. You can buy food at Grizzly Grocery before climbing Grizzly Peak or hiking Grizzly Gulch. You can have your furnace serviced by Grizzly Plumbing and Heating. Here in the Northern Rockies, and everywhere grizzlies are found, people erect statues of them, frame pictures on their walls, and, if they see a grizzly in the wild, tell breathless stories around campfires and dinner tables for the rest of their lives. Ask the tourists from around the world that flood into Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks what they most hope to see, and their answer is often the same: a grizzly bear.
The western half of the U.S. teemed with grizzlies at the time of European contact, with an estimated 50,000 or more living alongside Native Americans, from the Pacific to the midwestern prairies and into the mountains of Mexico. By the early 1970s, after centuries of relentless shooting, trapping, and poisoning by settlers, 600 to 800 grizzlies remained on a mere 2 percent of their former range in the alpine fastness of the Northern Rockies. Their slide into oblivion was stemmed in 1975 with their listing under the Endangered Species Act and the legal protections it afforded.