Yellowstone, Grand Teton staff work to keep people safe from bears

BILLINGS – Want to see two of the largest land-based predators in North America in the wild?

Then plan a visit to Yellowstone or Grand Teton national park, but please use some common sense.

Last year, Yellowstone recorded a record-high number of bear jams – the automobile gridlock that develops when people stop in the middle of the park’s narrow roads and rush blindly forward to see or photograph a bear.

Some excited tourists unwisely approach as close to the large predators as possible to snap a photo, despite regulations requiring them to stay 100 yards away, and ignoring that an adult male grizzly can weigh up to 700 pounds and run at bursts up to 35 mph.

Keeping bears and humans safe in and around these iconic national parks is no easy task.

“It takes a huge team to be able to manage these bear jams in the park,” Justin Schwabedissen, of Grand Teton National Park, told the Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee during a Wednesday meeting in Cody, Wyoming.

Policing people to protect bears

The subcommittee is part of the larger Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a science consortium of eight state and federal agencies that have partnered to study grizzlies since 1973.

The Yellowstone group’s work is focused on the forests and parks of southeastern Idaho, southwestern Montana and northwestern Wyoming. The area in which they manage grizzlies, called the Designated Monitoring Area, would be the 41st-largest state if broken out.

The subcommittee members’ work includes everything from monitoring grizzly populations to studies of their foods and habitat. Educating visitors to the bears’ homeland has also become increasingly necessary as visitation to the region and bear populations have grown.

Last year, Yellowstone hosted 4.74 million people with 95% of those visits coming between May and October when bears are not hibernating. The grizzly population in the greater ecosystem is estimated at 1,050 bears.

“We put a lot of work into conflict prevention,” said Kerry Gunther, Yellowstone’s chief bear biologist.

This can include shooting cracker shells or bean bag rounds at bears in developed areas to scare them away. Called hazing, this happened 101 times last year in Yellowstone. The park’s staff also hauls, on average, about 100 animal carcasses a year away from developed areas to avoid attracting bears and other predators to places where there are people.

“Last year we moved 31 bison carcasses,” Gunther said. “Have you ever moved bison? It’s not easy.”

Adult bison can weigh 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.

In 2024, Yellowstone recorded 499 grizzly bear jams and another 760 black bear gridlocks. To the south, Grand Teton had a minimum of 224 grizzly jams, 44% of all bear jams. To keep people and animals safe, more than 1,400 hours were spent by staff at the Yellowstone scenes.

In Grand Teton, two rangers, two interns and 32 volunteers helped out at bear jams, while the rangers also patrolled campsites and trailheads to ensure people aren’t leaving food or trash out that could attract bears.

“They’re talking with thousands of visitors each day about recreating safely in bear country,” Schwabedissen said of Grand Teton’s crew. “They’re teaching people how to use bear spray. They’re helping us with a lot of other wildlife-related projects. So really, hats off to these guys and their dedication.”

Unfortunately, at the same time as visitation to the region and bear numbers are up, federal funding is withering under the Trump administration’s cuts and key personnel are leaving amid the agencies’ uncertain future.

“We realize as visitation is increasing and inflation’s eating away our budgets, it’s probably going to increase the proportion of bear jams we don’t have staff present at,” Gunther said. “So we need to do a better job of trying to develop educational materials to promote proper bear-viewing etiquette among our visitors, because we’re going to be at a lower portion of bear jams, probably, in the future.”

Bear conflicts in the parks

Despite extensive educational efforts last year, bear-human conflicts did occur in the parks. Perhaps the strangest one was when a grizzly crawled through the kitchen window at a park seasonal employee’s residence at Mammoth, pulled open the cupboard door and began munching on granola bars and rolled oats, Gunther recounted.

“She thought it sounded like a drunk from the employee pub breaking into her house,” he said. “She thought, ‘Well, if I bark like a dog, the drunk may think there’s a dog in the house and leave.’ So she barked.”

It worked. The scared bear jumped back out through the window and ran into security guards who helped haze the bruin away. The bear was later caught in a trap set near the town of Gardiner. That was one of five incidents involving bears getting access to human food in the park last year. Generally, Gunther said, the park sees fewer than 10 such incidents a year.

Grand Teton had two human-grizzly bear conflicts last year. One bear came into a campsite and when it didn’t find food, the grizzly decided to chew on a paddle board and a hammock, Schwabedissen said.

The other involved a man hiking off-trail in May who encountered at least two bears and was attacked by one. It was the first bear mauling in the park in more than a decade.

“Our trend has been relatively low rates of conflicts, averaging just one or so a year,” Schwabedissen said. “However, I do want to highlight that if we look at human-bear conflicts in general in the park and include black bears … it’s a little bit different story. We are seeing a recent trend of increasing conflicts involving black bears. Almost all of these conflicts last year involved black bears accessing abandoned backpacks around our lakeshore areas in the park.”

Run-ins with bears infrequent

In Yellowstone, Gunther has calculated there’s only about one chance in 3.6 million visits of being injured by a grizzly bear. For those who stay in a campground, that climbs to one in 29.2 million.

“Camping in the backcountry increases the risk significantly, but it’s still pretty rare – one in 1.9 million overnight stays,” Gunther said. “Really, the recreationists who are most at risk are those hiking between campsites, where we see about one injury for 275,000 backcountry hiking days.”

Visitors can’t be injured if they never encounter a bear, but for those who do, the chances of a bear attack are about one per 91 backcountry encounters, he said.

“That’s probably biased high because a lot of visitors, if they get bluff charged, or if they get injured, they report it,” Gunther added.

The data was based on 8,000 reports of bear encounters in Yellowstone between 1991 and the present. In 56% of the encounters, the bears had a neutral response. In one-third of the chance meetings, bears fled. Bears attacked in less than 1% of the reported incidents.