Travel Tips for Grizzly Country

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Wildflowers Photo Gallery

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Nowadays, grizzlies often flee the moment they sense a nearby human. Is this normal? Historical accounts of the first meetings between Europeans and grizzlies no doubt exaggerate the ferocity of grizzlies; nevertheless, it's clear the bears weren't so quick to run away 200 years ago.

Let's not forget that shortly after the Lewis and Clark expedition killed thirty-seven grizzly bears on their journey to the Pacific, we slaughtered millions of buffalo and began trapping and shooting bears to protect dull-witted domestic livestock. As civilization advanced, ranchers introduced bears to the perils of strychnine, 1080, and other deadly poisons. In the 1960s, Alaska state employees—at the bequest of cattle ranchers on Kodiak Island—gunned down the biggest bears on earth from planes. During Alaska's pipeline days, construction workers fed bears dynamite sandwiches and blew their heads off. In less than 200 years, we reduced the grizzly population in the continental United States from at least 50,000 bears to less than 1,000.

Little wonder the few surviving grizzlies have a tendency to avoid us. But we can only say bears normally avoid people if we're willing to say our behavior toward grizzlies during the past 200 years was normal. I'd like to think it was an aberration and that in the future we'll have the grace, the generosity of spirit, to accommodate grizzly bears.

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