Looming above the Yellowstone River and Highway 89, the Absaroka Range forms an intimidating eastern wall for the Paradise Valley. Despite their impenetrable appearance, those serrated peaks may hold the passage connecting the two largest concentrations of grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains.
Or maybe not. The lack of a clear answer to that connectivity question was a core reason a federal judge rejected a Custer Gallatin National Forest environmental assessment to expand cattle grazing along the East Paradise Range. In his September 17 ruling, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy told the U.S. Forest Service to show its work.
“If there is no impact on connectivity, the EA should state that conclusion,” Molloy wrote in Western Watersheds Project vs. Schultz. And in considering whether cattle grazing in grizzly habitat might increase conflicts resulting in more grizzly deaths, he added that the Forest Service’s analysis was “inadequate.”
“While the agency may ultimately conclude that the degree of adverse effects is minimal,” Molloy wrote, “that conclusion is not a ‘convincing statement’ so long as it does not address the issues identified above.”
The case questioned the Forest Service’s granting of six grazing allotments in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains along the east side of Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone National Park. Custer Gallatin officials began considering modifying the allotments in 2013. In 2021, they signed the East Paradise grazing permit covering 20,900 acres in the Suce Creek, Pine Creek, Elbow Creek, Mill Creek, Sixmile Creek and Sixmile South drainages, roughly between Livingston and Emigrant. Those extend into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness and parts of the North Absaroka Roadless Area.
Although cattle have been grazing there for decades, at least three of the allotments have been vacant since 2009 and were expected to remain that way. The proposed changes expanded some of the grazing areas by about 1,000 acres to allow for easier movement between pastures and moved up the seasonal opening time from July to June.
Grizzlies may use that mountain range to travel between Yellowstone Park and the Crazy, Castle and Little Belt mountains to the north, although no grizzlies have made that link to date, according to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. Those ranges are the stepping stones for connecting with the population of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — the only other major bear stronghold in the Lower 48. Grizzlies killed in the Absaroka-Beartooths would be the most pioneering individuals likely to make that habitat connection, and therefore were considered “proportionately greater than costs entailed by deaths closer to the center of the ecosystem,” the ruling stated.
That fact is important, Molloy noted, because a 2017 effort to remove Endangered Species Act protection from Greater Yellowstone grizzlies failed in court in part because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service failed to show how it would affect connectivity with other grizzly populations.
The Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems have been the most successful, growing grizzly numbers from a few hundred in the 1970s to approximately 1,000 bears each today.
The ESA 1993 grizzly recovery plan created six “recovery areas” where state and federal wildlife managers would concentrate their efforts at reviving bear populations. Two of the recovery areas have less than 100 grizzlies each, and two have none at all. The Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems have been the most successful, growing grizzly numbers from a few hundred in the 1970s to approximately 1,000 bears each today.
However, there has been no recorded mingling of those two populations, even though radio-collared grizzly monitoring shows they’ve come within 30 miles or less. Connecting, and more importantly, interbreeding of the two populations is important to improve their genetic diversity, according to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. The Greater Yellowstone grizzly bear community has been isolated from other bears for at least 100 years and is the least genetically diverse in the Lower 48. In 2024, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear managers trucked two grizzlies captured near Glacier National Park to Wyoming, where they were released in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for genetic augmentation.
Grizzly bear range outside Yellowstone National Park has nearly tripled in size since the 1980s. Today, about 30 percent of grizzly-occupied Greater Yellowstone country is outside the original recovery and demographic monitoring area — places like the Paradise Valley. This has been driven in part by the loss of historic bear foods such as whitebark pine seeds and cutthroat trout in the park area, driving bears to seek out army cutworm moths in the Absaroka-Beartooths.
In the East Paradise lawsuit, the government argued that bringing cattle in earlier in the year would help control invasive plant species and avoid the potential transmission of brucellosis between cattle and wild bison, although no record of this transmission has ever been recorded. But Molloy noted the Forest Service left out the negative aspects of moving livestock into grizzly habitat, even though a 2021 FWS biological opinion “explicitly states that increased grizzly bear mortality is possible” if the grazing season is expanded. Connecting those dots is required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Defendants once again conflate a reasoned explanation for omitting potentially relevant information (permissible under NEPA) with a complete absence of such information (impermissible under NEPA),” Molloy wrote. “Because the EA fails to provide any information on this point to assess the significance of the environmental impact of the action, it does not meet the NEPA mandate.”
Mary Erickson, retired supervisor of the Custer Gallatin Forest, oversaw much of the drafting of the East Paradise grazing permits. She told Mountain Journal those allotments had little history of grizzly-livestock conflict.
“When we met with the groups during the objections process, they used Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly conflict data,” Erickson said. “When you use it for the ecosystem as a whole, it shows how much livestock grazing is a conflict that creates mortality. But the Custer Gallatin hasn’t had those conflicts. The data reflects problems down in the Green River in Wyoming.”
Bozeman-based Gallatin Wildlife Association was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Its president, Clinton Nagel, told Mountain Journal he didn’t expect the ruling to end the controversy of grazing in the Absaroka-Beartooths. But he added it did spotlight the problem of mixing grizzlies and cattle on public land where ranchers would have an excuse to kill bears preying on their livestock.
“Our long-term goal is to make sure grizzly bears and other wildlife have the ability to stay on their native landscape,” Nagel said. “We don’t want to see domestic animals preclude that existence.”
