ISLAND PARK, Idaho – From the top of 9,898-foot Sawtell Peak, just outside the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park, I imagined I was a young male grizzly bear on the move, seeking new territory beyond the park’s safety.
Grizzlies (Ursus arctos horribilis) — powerful and omnivorous — are able travelers and often on the lookout for new habitats. That’s especially true for younger bears, which must disperse and find their own personal territories away from established, ornery, solitary males, which are known to kill cubs.
Dispersing grizzlies which happen to wander beyond the national park, where hunting is prohibited, must run a gauntlet of human dangers: highways, tempting-but-deadly garbage piles, tasty and easy prey such as sheep and, most of all, people, whose first instinct oftentimes is to reach for a gun, a trap or a poison.
The essential question becomes: How do grizzlies, which were nearly wiped out in the Yellowstone region and most of their historic range in the lower 48 states more than a century ago, naturally expand their current range and grow their numbers so that extinction is no longer a threat?
It’s not theoretical. A few weeks ago the Trump administration took Yellowstone’s grizzlies off the endangered species list, renewing questions about how — and whether — these bears will ever connect with other grizzly populations in the northern Rocky Mountains. In the long run, bear experts say, that connectivity will be critical to a healthy population of bears in the lower 48.
Conservation organizations and academic biologists support this natural dispersion and connectivity, where grizzlies could move through protected corridors across a vast landscape and find other grizzly populations. There, they can mix their genes and improve their odds to survive as a species.
On the other hand, state and federal government wildlife managers support an approach where isolated populations of grizzly bears are confined to within highly controlled “Demographic Monitoring Areas” that limit natural connectivity to reduce the bears’ impact on human activities. If and when the grizzlies need a genetic boost to secure their long-term survival, breeding animals can be translocated from one location to another.
The long-term fate of about 700 world-famous Yellowstone grizzlies and about 1,100 other grizzly scattered across pockets in the Northern Rockies — and the fate of how the Endangered Species Act will be implemented in the future, particularly when it comes large, wide-ranging predators such as grizzlies and wolves — hinges on which management approach is ultimately adopted.
The grizzly bear is the oblivious star in a high-stakes legal and political battle that is now unfolding that will determine how and where grizzlies will share the upper Rocky Mountain landscape with human beings.
From my perch on Sawtell, I had a grand view of a fork in the grizzly trail, one that is fraught with danger — and the other with a fragile promise of unclaimed territory.
To the south lies the resort community of Island Park, where the summer population swells to more than 10,000 as visitors flock to summer homes, RV parks, cattle ranches and campgrounds scattered throughout the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. U.S. Highway 20 bisects the community. Its 70-mile per hour speed limit and heavy truck traffic pose a significant obstacle for a young grizzly in search of new turf.
If a bear meanders through Island Park, it risks creating a ruckus by delving into garbage cans, ripping down bird feeders, munching on dog food or preying on livestock — all actions that could attract attention from wildlife managers who could decide to take lethal action on the “problem” animal. Even if the bear escapes that gauntlet and heads to the southwest, it will descend into a valley filled with hostile farmers — a certain dead end.
But if a grizzly heads northwest towards Henry’s Lake at the base of Sawtell Peak, and manages to avoid a couple of campgrounds and ever-encroaching subdivisions, and ascends into the Centennial Mountains that cut to the wes