Grizzly bear activity seemed to start with a roar on May 4 when two hikers were mauled in Yellowstone National Park.
But the big bears have been active since close to New Year’s Day. And that has Yellowstone wildlife experts bracing for a hairy summer.
“It’s a little early for us,” Yellowstone Chief Ranger Tim Reid told colleagues at the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s gathering of Yellowstone Ecosystem subcommittee on May 6. “This whole winter set the stage for everything being early. Normally it would be all post-holing and snow, but visitors have taken advantage of good hiking conditions.”
Reid did not release any new details about the incident beyond the fact both victims were receiving treatment in Idaho Falls and were expected to recover. A lack of snow has tempted spring hikers onto dry trails they’d typically avoid. That may have contributed to the violent encounter between two brothers and one or two grizzlies on the Mystic Falls trail near the Old Faithful Geyser complex. The area northwest of Old Faithful has typically been closed to spring hiking in order to avoid bear conflicts. That rule was relaxed in 2024.
Despite that national headline-spawning attack, Yellowstone bear manager Kerry Gunther said another grizzly incident the next day showed the challenge of keeping humans and bears safe and separate. A dead bison carcass in a roadside section of the Yellowstone River drew three grizzlies and four wolves to feed. The scene attracted many tourists who ignored both Yellowstone’s 100-yard distance rule and ranger warnings.
“When we tried to get people back, they started yelling at us to leave,” Gunther said. “We talked to one woman who couldn’t believe bears were dangerous.”
The two events illustrated the paradox of managing grizzly bears in Greater Yellowstone. On one hand, grizzlies are so few in number that they have been under Endangered Species Act protection since 1975. On the other, they cause disproportionate impact wherever they appear.
Much of that was outlined in the May 6 Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee meeting in Bozeman, which was originally scheduled for last November. The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee and its several sub-groups lost traction when the federal government shut down for 43 days last fall. Its executive committee, which typically meets in December and June, still doesn’t have a meeting scheduled for 2026.
IGBC has a hefty handful of management tasks this year. On the legal level, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has until December 8 to retain, revise or revoke the grizzly bear’s ESA status. The service updated grizzly rules in the final weeks of the Biden administration: reducing the protection area from the entire Lower 48 to just Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and parts of Washington; and rejecting state requests to turn federal bear management over to local wildlife agencies.
Incoming Trump administration officials and congressional members in several states protested those changes, and vowed to strip ESA protections from grizzlies. Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines, among others, maintain grizzlies have reached recovery and should be delisted.
On one hand, grizzlies are so few in number that they have been under Endangered Species Act protection since 1975. On the other, they cause disproportionate impact wherever they appear.
Grizzly bear recovery depends on the answer to a complicated question: How many grizzlies are enough? In the five decades since they came under federal protection, the Greater Yellowstone grizzly population has grown from a few hundred to an estimated 1,055 in 2025, according to IGBC Study Team Director Matthew Gould.
“We’ve seen this recovery process come to a plateau in terms of occupied range,” Gould said of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which is one of six recovery areas where wildlife managers have focused their efforts on restoring grizzly populations. The Yellowstone bears appear to have reached a forecasted level where their numbers bounce up and down but generally float above the annual target of between 800 and 950 animals.
The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem in northwestern Montana has a similar recovery situation with about 1,000 grizzly bears occupying the mountains from Glacier National Park south to Missoula and Helena. But of the remaining four recovery areas, two struggle to support a few dozen bears and two have no resident populations. One of those empty areas, the Bitterroot Ecosystem on the Montana-Idaho border, is under court order to restart a grizzly reintroduction experiment that’s been stalled for two decades. FWS Grizzly Recovery Coordinator Hilary Cooley told the subcommittee that an environmental impact statement for that reintroduction is due to publish this November.
Then there’s the day-to-day bear business. Wildlife managers from Montana and Wyoming said ranchers in both states were sending reports of grizzlies killing livestock earlier than usual this year. Grand Teton National Park bear biologist Justin Schwabedissen added he’s already seeing grizzly sows with cubs of the year along the park’s roadways, which can trigger “bear jams” of fascinated tourists and photographers. Last summer, his staff had to deal with 217 bear jams.
“It takes an awful lot of resources to provide those opportunities in a way that’s safe for bears to move across the landscape while also providing for public safety,” Schwabedissen told the subcommittee. He credited much of that to the all-volunteer Wildlife Brigade, whose 33 members donated 11,619 hours of crowd-wrangling and education outreach last year.
In Yellowstone Park, Gunther said he relies on 10 professional staff to keep 5 million visitors each summer out of grizzly trouble. The park logged 602 grizzly jams (and another 922 black bear jams) in 2025. Each tends to consume about three-and-a-half hours of a ranger’s time to monitor and clear.
That number didn’t include another 147 bear jams which came and went before a ranger could arrive last year. Gunther said one common problem is tourists surrounding the animal as they jockey for front-of-the-line viewing angles.
“It can become a real mess fast if we don’t have staff present,” Gunther said. “We need to develop better ways of improving visitor viewing etiquette.”
The bears learn new tricks too. For more than 50 years, the park has used a trash can design with a special lid that seals itself by gravity so scavengers can’t get food rewards.
“Last year, one male learned that if you flip it over, you can bang it around and garbage will come out,” Gunther said. “We removed that bear. You get a lot of hate mail when you have to remove a bear. We feel like we fail when we have to remove a bear. We’re doing the best we can.”
