Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee
15 comments
·May 10, 2025pavel_lishin
Sometimes I really regret whatever turns my life took, that resulted in me not having a business card with "Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee" on it.
aaronbaugher
It's not too late. I had 100 business cards made that have (among other things) "Lumberjack" listed as one of my professions. I gave one to my girlfriend when we first met, and it got me the date.
pavel_lishin
Oh, sure, but I could not possibly dream of stealing this particular valor.
smithkl42
Did you sleep all night, and work all day?
skeeter2020
it's convenient for us Canadians that US Grizzly Bears adhere to a geo-political, largely unpoliced, sparsely populated border.
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bee_rider
It is inconvenient for us Grizzly Bears that all these stupid monkeys invented a line and started hassling everybody about it. Unfortunately, you never know which monkey knows the “pop! You die.” trick.
nick3443
We should be taking a measured approach to shooting them (by that I mean we should be shooting them). So that they know to leave people alone.
RandallBrown
I wonder why only the Selkirk Recovery Zone crosses borders, especially when BC and Alberta are listed among the partner agencies.
I think all of the recent (last 15 or so years) grizzly sightings in the North Cascades are speculated to be visiting bears from Canada.
codeduck
I think one of those bears just dined on the parent poster. Rest in peace, RandallBrown
jjulius
This is why the whole discussion around reintroducing them into the North Cascades in Washington has fascinated me (I take no sides, though as a backpacker in that area, I'd kinda prefer not to have to deal with them - black bears trend afraid of us, I've never minded spotting them!). British Columbia has them, and the border doesn't prevent them from making their way down here. I've yet to understand why that is the case - what keeps them from actually coming into the Washington Cascades and making themselves at home?
dogman144
Layman’s understanding, but the only real prevention is time and if there’s an existing grizzly pop down there. Reason grizzs are expanding is the males have very large roaming territory, and each new adolescent male needs to find its own or face conflict. If you’re backpacking in an area with a pop, good odds there’s 1x grizz per 6 square miles.
Hunting and environmental damage could play a role, but I don’t think modern hunting/F&G policies could do much. They are very adaptable creatures and eat a variety of stuff, so I speculate you’d have to have real ecosystem collapse to cause them to bow out of an area.
End of the day for me - grizzlies ranged the entire country in 1776 times, and then by the 1970’s got boxed into Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming basically. If that bear disappeared/disappears, it’d be a tragedy. Meet a bear or see one skinned and they’re pretty darn close to human-looking. The Montana pop in glacier is about to join with the Wyoming pop in Yellowstone, they’re now in the bighorns in WY, and get spotted in eastern plains Montana now.
If you’re not hunting and dressing game, as most hikers are not, the main danger comes from surprising them, so just keep head on a swivel and carry bear spray. Carry a 10mm or .44 and up for if you get stalked by one. NOLS Lander has a good YouTube video on grizzly safety. After long enough accounting for this, I realized I wasn’t really “hiking” in non-bear areas much as marching around woods acting like I was, and I haven’t looked at the non-bear areas the same.
MiguelVieira
Related: Recovering Grizzly Bears in California
https://docs.calgrizzly.org/docs/CGA-Feasibility-Study-2025....
smithkl42
Heading out on Friday to do a black bear hunt in two of those Grizzly recovery zones...
I recently rewatched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man. It's a Werner Herzog film about Timothy Treadwell's story. It's a classic story of "well, his heart was definitely in the right place" kind of a situation.
Charlie Russell, a Canadian naturalist who worked with Treadwell offered a different perspective on it http://cloudline.org/treadwell.html. He is a bit critical of how Herzog presented Treadwell and the bears in the documentary.