In the Northern Rockies, grizzly bears are on the move
hcn.org
hcn.org
The article covers some facts well. The bears are expanding range and interacting with humans more often.
I cannot recall specifics, but there are some valid arguments across multiple stakeholders and incentives for removing them from the endangered species list and allowing more hunting.
When I hike out here, I have bear spray and a 10mm. Grizzlies are dangerous animals, you can surprise them in odd areas and distances, and it’s fairly windy in many of the risk areas which impacts spray.
That said, the article felt a bit disingenuous in how it described the bears as a vicious mankiller.
Standard knowledge is 90% of the interactions are when you surprise a grizzly bear. The odds further lower that you’d surprise a bear leading to an interaction vs seeing the bear over a valley. If it happens, play dead on your stomach. They’ll swipe at you and walk away. *edit, should say the odds of getting to this are even more low, as they’ll usually huff/puff, and then “bluff charge”, and then worst case it could get to an attack to “end the threat” but not “eat you.” You can get hurt badly this way, but not a man-eater attack by no means. The other 10% are when they hunt after you, and then I yes I carry a 10mm and hike with a dog. But the odds of getting that far vs bear spray working are low too.
If the author is making a narrative around nature as to get people to read about mature, I can def respect that. But bears shouldn’t be feared beyond a healthy fear/respect border, especially if further interaction is likely.
This is a good resource to learn about bears from NOLS in Wyoming:
The meetup point was ~12 miles off the main dirt road, and I got permanently stuck about 10 miles in. I got out and hiked the rest of the distance through a couple feet of snow, along a creek bed with a large draw on my other side. Once I got to the spot, I waited for them, but they didn't show up. After two hours, I turned back (to get somewhere with signal if possible) and after about 1/4 mile, realized there were large bear tracks criss-crossed all over my tracks.
I put my head on a swivel and after about a half mile, finally spotted the large brown bear, up on the draw (now to my left). It was about 200 yards behind me. It was cautiously following me, and we proceeded this way for probably another quarter mile. I was still at least a mile from my vehicle, and there were no humans around for who knows how far, let alone mobile considering how much snow we got.
At that point, the bear started coming down the draw, and my nervousness turned into all out panic. I was shaking like a leaf and lost my nerve. I gave it a warning shot with my .357 and thankfully, it decided I was scary enough to not be worth the curiosity. The .357 has a 1.8" barrel and is unfathomably loud, so despite not being a great bear gun, it did the trick there. I do have a 10mm, but I had sent it up to hunting camp with my friends.
My personal unscientific take, largelt biased from that experience is that we should kill 5-10 of the most human adapted bears every year, and not leave it to chance that they will ignore us.
The article portrayed what's going on with livestock ranching, hunting, and tourism quite well, but it left out the fact that these bears are just getting less afraid of humans in general as interaction increases. It would be wise to select against that if we can.
I hike with a gun for basically those scenarios. I stay fresh with a range but it seems that warning shots are mostly as far as it goes. There is a bad story of a hunting guide getting killed near an elk carcass though, either Dubois or Cody area I can’t recall. So it can def go south if they’re looking at you more deliberately. Glad you made it!
Thanks for sharing! I’m on that side less often, more the Absarokas.
It was very intense, but in the end we all got out safely, thankfully.
>There is a bad story of a hunting guide getting killed near an elk carcass though, either Dubois or Cody area I can’t recall.
Mark Uptain is probably who you're thinking of. It's dubious that he would have died if the hunter didn't abandon him. Very tragic.
Anyways, I'd much rather be on this side of the Absaroka's when it comes to grizzlies!
Isn't it also possible, that the interactions are increasing, because simply more people (without a clue) are going into bear territory?
Otherwise yes, the bears should not forget to avoid humans.
When I first moved to where I live now, there were (and still are obviously) three mountain ranges. Two of them were commonly regarded as grizzly free. Not anymore.
In general I think it is a good thing, but the wilderness is not a wild park.
There’s a big jump b/t National parks and hiking around Denver vs the designated wilderness areas where the bears are - Washakie, Absaroka/Bearooth, Bridger, etc.
Locals and big game expeditions are common but it’s 2 hrs on a forest service road after 2 hours on US Highway after flying into a Regional airport connected from Denver to get out there. Yellowstone thankfully absorbs a ton of visitor traffic as well. Additionally, especially after urban Montana and CO’s challenges paired with existing ranch power, these areas aren’t getting developed any time soon. There’s a wall of public land and ranches surrounding the bear areas, in short.
Yellowstone has bears but the risk areas where you’re legitimately entering their space are in the designated wildernesses.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/mXMHAjDyQNDjFqjw8
What you said about playing dead does resonate: I remember one episode where about five of us were sitting very still, and the bear was nosing around about five feet from us. I don't think it was at all curious about us. In other cases, the guides would just raise their hands and shout at the bears and scare them away.
On the other hand, I watched a nature TV show, also shot on Kodiak, where the guy noticed one bear that was giving him the stink-eye. Occasionally one will take a dislike to you and you don't want to stick around.
Is that a gun in your pocket or are you pleased to see me but underwhelmingly endowed?
More seriously, I assume that's the bore of a gun. Coming from a nation without guns (or bears), I don't know what that says about it. Clarification welcome.
Often (usually) there will be qualifiers (often the brand name of the first manufacturer of a given round, or the inventor of it). Qualifiers like "Auto", "Magnum", "NATO", etc are also common and have specific meanings.
Colloquially in the US, "10mm" corresponds to "10mm Auto"[1] which is a moderately popular handgun cartridge. 10mm rounds are towards the larger / more powerful end of the popular range for handguns, but are still far from what most people would consider "packing for bear". Guns chambered for larger and more powerful rounds are available, but as with everything there are tradeoffs. With 10mm you sacrifice some "stopping power" (a simplistic calculation would be speed in feet-per-second times the mass of the projectile) per-shot, but can probably carry more total rounds, than something larger like, say, .44 Magnum[2] or .454 Casull[3]. So one weighs "would I be better off with n shots with x stopping power, or n-s shots with x*q stopping power, for some number of fewer shots s, and some additional power (as a ratio) q"?
Other factors that come into play are cost, recoil, weight of the weapon itself (besides the cartridges), etc. Anyway, net-net, for people who live in bear country, from what I've seen, 10mm is often seen as a good compromise for bear protection. But I'm sure plenty of people prefer the .44 Magnum, the .454 Casull, or even something like .50AE[4].
We have bears where I live, but they're not common-place in this part of the state, and they're mostly black bears, and while they certainly can be dangerous, black bears are the smallest bear species that is common in North America. And at least around here, they still seem to be fairly "human shy" even when encountered. So on the occasions when I carry a pistol in the outdoors, I just go with the same 9mm I carry everywhere else. TBH, I'm not really thinking about bear protection much in those cases... I'm mostly carrying for protection from my fellow humans. shrug
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10mm_Auto
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.44_Magnum
Quick calculation with wikipedia data:
Impulse Bear: 15 m/s * 410 kg = 6377.7 Ns
Impulse 10 mm bullet: 390 m/s * 0.01 kg = 3.9 Ns
6377 - 3.9 = 6373 -> seems not that great of an impact, barely slows him down.
But if you hit a leg and the bear will fall - then he is stopped.
Note too that there are other factors (penetration depth, projectile expansion / fragmentation, etc) that come into play. And with many of those things, there's a lot of folklore around, some science which may or may not carry over (for example, the question of how projectiles fragment in ballistic gel, versus in actual flesh), and no small amount of controversy and debate. If you want to amuse yourself sometime, find a couple of friends who are avid shooters and ask them "which round is the best round for self-defense, vis-a-vis stopping power?" Most likely they'll still be arguing about it 2 or 3 hours later when you quietly slip away to go do something else...
Yes, some smaller rounds expand upon impact and tramsfer lots of energy, more efficiently as well, but the problem is that they may expand in fat or bone, before hitting vital organs. So they might not work as well.
In a bear charging scenario, you aren't precisely aiming. You are praying your bullets make it past the extremely dense bones and wipe out vital organs. The best way to do this is big bullet travelimg fast.
P.S. - when people say stopping power, they usually mean stopping the animal's heart. This is basically the ability to transfer energy to vital organs, which is a combination of penetration and energy transfer.
/$.02
Ya I was leaning to a s&w .44 initially. Generally I think there’s a school of thought of handcannon and 1-2 shots vs more rounds off and good enough load. Reports of encounters where the handgun mattered tend to vary b/t .357, .44, 10mm bear load, etc.
But, there’s a guy in an Alaska on YouTube who did a comparison of all the usual rd/weapon combos suggested, 10mm bear load + Glock 20 (what I use) did the best. I was comfortable with Glocks already so that’d wrapped it.
I'm not a gun expert by any means btw.
The round size you’d need to drop a bear quick basically implies you should hike with a rifle. So if you can’t do a single shot approach that makes sense (ie hike with a rifle), multiple shots with lower recoil and suitable bear load seemed logical. Then YouTube Alaska guy did all the ballistic pros/cons too.
Why are articles so often filled with a bunch of totally irrelevant details. Is it supposed to be for our benefit as readers or is it just fun for the writer, like the literary equivalent of a wanky guitar solo?
I can understand providing useful context, even setting a scene or providing a little color, but when it's totally off-topic and entirely irrelevant why include it? It feels like pointless filler, like something someone does to disguise a lack of actual content, but this article is already full of good information and was otherwise well written. It's not a problem with this one author or their editor either. Since I see it so often I figure there must be a reason behind it.
Just like visual artists, good writers deliver experiences. Some don't have the luxury of doing this, or the interest.
But in order to even attempt to give a reader access to the feelings of surprise, fear, change that Nathan Keane, the opening character of the story, might have had on that morning when he first discovered a grizzly on his ranch, one needs these details.
I'd offer that perhaps you might take them in aggregate, holistically - as you might a work of art.
"Show, don't tell" is a common axiom among writers for a reason.
I re-read the first paragraph, and I disagree that all of it was critical for conveying his surprise. I'd do just as well with something like:
> "Nathan Keane is an early riser. One early June day in 2020, as he waited for the coffee to brew, he glanced out the kitchen window and did a double take. There — no more than 30 feet from the house — was a grizzly bear."
Maybe it's just because I have a good imagination, but also I think most people seeing a grizzly bear while making their morning coffee would be surprised. Knowing what time their kids get out of bed doesn't help with that.
What I hadn't considered, is that this article should be looked at as art instead of as information. Art is allowed to get in the way of information. Art is also subjective, so some people might prefer this artistic style of writing that meanders in and out of the topic to take time for irrelevant minutia. Maybe it's because enough people do enjoy it that I keep seeing it. I was mostly looking for information, and so it annoyed me.
I was just looking to learn something cool about bears, and not looking for an experience. I don't think information needs to be delivered in the most dry and boring way possible, but I don't like to waste my time either. Taken as information, the art got in the way. As art, well, this type of non-fiction storytelling might just not be for me.
You wanted the author to write a different kind of story, but they didn’t. They wrote this one.