Grizzly 399 wasn’t just another wild bear in northwestern Wyoming; she was a window into the secret lives of grizzlies. Over nearly three decades she raised 18 cubs amidst the millions of visitors and residents of Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park.

Her death speaks, as her life did, about the urgent need to better protect these intelligent, rare creatures from roads, human foods, farm animals and trophy hunters.

Grizzly 399’s life captivated millions of people. Attentive and patient, she worked hard to make sure her cubs had sufficient food and warm dens and were protected from male bears and other dangers.

The doings of her many families, the first in 2004 and the last in 2023, made her legendary, like the time she and her four cubs feasted on serviceberries right next to a road, gently picking berries among the leaves.

There was also the time she crossed the Snake River with four cubs following like the tail of a kite, while hundreds of people gathered to witness. These intimate glimpses inspired countless numbers of visitors to Wyoming’s wilderness and gave them a connection with the famous bear and her broods.

Grizzly 399 had always been careful around roads. She often waited at a highway’s edge until a photographer stopped traffic or she heard no vehicles coming her way. She frequently navigated busy highways and the streets around Jackson Hole.

In the end it was not enough.

Vehicle collisions, a leading cause of wildlife deaths, are just one more threat for grizzly bears. This year alone, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has seen record numbers of mortalities. By October 2024, at least 68 grizzlies had died—most killed because they came near humans or were shot by hunters.

With their habitats shrinking, their foods vanishing and more roads fragmenting their territories, grizzlies have become marooned on geographic islands for their survival. Their lands have been increasingly hemmed in by developments, energy projects and deadly highways.

Once 50,000 strong, fewer than 2,000 grizzly bears now survive in the Lower 48 states. Coexisting with them means addressing preventable conflicts by bear-proofing human-food sources or safeguarding livestock. Many of Grizzly 399’s cubs were killed by humans. Perhaps half of them survived to adulthood.

One Jackson Hole resident, for example, deliberately and defiantly fed them, despite the dangers of getting bears accustomed to human-provided meals. Teton County has since introduced tougher enforcement measures, including requiring bear-resistant garbage cans with self-locking mechanisms. The Wyoming Department of Game and Fish and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also required residents of Teton County to make garbage and bird feeders inaccessible to keep Grizzly 399 and her cubs safe.

One takeaway is that grizzly bears can be managed with compassion. This needs to be the norm, not the exception, and we need to shift practices to prioritize coexistence over killing.

In bear country, people can make human foods unavailable, ranchers can employ electric fencing and remove cattle and sheep carcasses, and hunters can carry bear spray and accurately identify their targets before shooting.

Grizzly 399’s last surviving cub, Spirit, has not been seen since its mother’s death. Nearly two years old, the cub was last reported as healthy and may have a chance at survival. Its future—indeed, the future of all grizzlies—depends on people’s willingness to change behaviors.

It is especially important that we resist calls to strip grizzly bears of their Endangered Species Act protections, certainly until grizzlies are truly recovered, with genetically diverse and connected populations across secure habitats.

This means creating safe passages, including highway crossings, between their populations. We must also hold the line against trophy hunting. Removing Endangered Species Act protections, which are now under attack in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and elsewhere, could set back years of conservation work.

With Grizzly 399’s passing, it feels as though something is missing in the Tetons—something vivid and wild that moved us. Her legacy calls us to act, to create a future in which grizzly bears and people live together in safety.

The writers are contributors to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Wendy Keefover works for the Humane Society of the United States; Kristin Combs is executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates.

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She has 50,000 followers on Facebook and a recent post on her page there had 4,200 likes, 250 comments and 400 shares within a day. When you Google her, roughly 125 million results come up. Born in 1996, she has had 18 children, including quadruplets born in 2020. She is Bear 399, the most famous grizzly in the Northern Rockies.

I’ve seen videos of Bear 399 and her offspring, including one from a security camera at the police station in downtown Jackson, Wyoming, that showed five large bears strolling down a city street. But I’ve never seen the family in person. I’d like to, but part of me believes it’s my responsibility as a wildlife lover not to try to find her.

People were looking for her this spring. They knew where she’d denned, and so, when the famous five-some emerged in Grand Teton National Park, 15 to 20 cars were waiting. Word spread quickly, and soon roughly 100 vehicles lined the road to catch a glimpse of the group.

The bears are undeniably cute. They have a rolling, pigeon-toed gait that is amusing to watch. The cubs frolic around mama, while she continues on her way, ignoring their antics, but always watching to make sure they are near. Their faces are expressive, their bodies roly-poly and cuddly. They play like kids with a harried mother who is slightly overwhelmed by her disorderly brood.

But therein lies a problem. Wildlife biologists have chosen not to name animals they study, instead giving them numbers for identification lest we anthropomorphize them. But that hasn’t worked for 399.

Her life story and personality has made her beloved by people all over the world, and especially in her home around Jackson Hole. She seems to be used to the human attention. We relate to her life, her children and her adventures, ignoring that she is a wild grizzly bear. We forget that she can be as dangerous to us as we are to her.

Hilary Cooley, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said at a meeting of state and federal wildlife and land managers last August, “The future’s not bright for these guys. They’ve been in a lot of trouble.”

During the quadruplets’ lives, they’ve gotten into livestock feed, human garbage and backyard beehives. In 2020, that happened five times. In 2021, it was 17 times, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. They’ve walked through neighborhoods and they often cross highways. They’re around popular trails where people hike, bike and run.

399 had one encounter with a hiker in 2007 when the man — a friend of mine from Lander — stumbled upon her with her cubs feeding on an elk carcass. My friend doesn’t blame 399 for attacking him, which caused some nasty bites. Still, it was a scary experience, and that’s what seems to be missing in the media frenzy over 399.

She’s not a toy. She’s not a person. She’s an unpredictable, large, omnivorous, intelligent animal that has discovered she can find easy food near humans and continues to teach her children that skill.

We’ve probably all heard the expression, “A fed bear is a dead bear.” Studies show that eating human food or trash can turn a wild bear into a food-conditioned one. Suddenly the animal, which relies on a varied diet to maintain adequate weight for survival, has a new, easily accessible yummy food source: from a garbage can, a birdfeeder or a beehive. These bears grow less wary of humans, and, over time, often become aggressive.

To its credit, Teton County, Wyoming, has updated its land-development regulations. Beginning in July, residents will be asked to bear-proof garbage containers, livestock feed, birdfeeders, compost and beehives.

Still, Hilary Cooley, who works to save grizzlies, is not optimistic. She’s told reporters she thinks it’s likely one, two, or all of the family will have serious conflicts with humans during their lifetimes, leaving wildlife managers with a narrow range of options. And, to compound the problem, the family has moved south out of the park, toward trouble.

People can do a lot to help prevent this. For me, it means remembering that 399 is wild. It means not hopping into my car to go join the bear jam. It means making sure my property or my campsite is bear-proof. It means carrying bear spray.

It means trying not to be part of the problem. Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She writes in Wyoming.

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When Westerners think of Yellowstone, probably what comes to mind are its grizzlies, exploding geysers, wolf packs and bison traffic jams, not to mention bubbling, iridescent hot pools that attract swarms of visitors from all over the world. The park is a jewel of the Northern Rockies, but to this journalist who has covered its stories for 35 years, the real miracle of Yellowstone is its intricate world of wildlife.

Yet any discussion of wildlife here comes wrapped in a paradox. Despite Covid-19, or perhaps because of it, in 2021 Yellowstone smashed monthly, seasonal and annual visitation records, notching nearly 4.9 million visits. That is 860,000 more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic struck. This year, given social media and marketing aimed at the park’s 150^th anniversary, it’s possible that Yellowstone could surpass the 5 million mark.

Even if it doesn’t hit that milestone, many locals who have visited the park for decades say its roads and its capacity for serving visitors are already overwhelmed, as are many public facilities in the gateway towns of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Although the crushing visitation happens on a tiny percent of parkland, all these curious tourists create waves of troubling ripple effects.

Yellowstone is neither a standalone island nor a drive-through zoo. It is unique, the last ecosystem in the Lower 48 to contain all of the original mammal species that were on the landscape before Europeans arrived on the continent.

Now, based on the diversity and health of its wildlife populations, Yellowstone is wilder than it was in 1872, when poachers, bounty, and market hunters nearly wiped out all wildlife in the country.

Grizzly bears have been rescued from a population free fall. Wolves were brought back by the Interior Department under Bruce Babbitt in the mid-1990s, and the park’s bison population, which  numbered just 23 at one point in the late 19^th century, is at 5,000.

Had Yellowstone not been created, had winter range beyond Yellowstone not existed, and had environmental protection laws not been put in place, it’s doubtful that those original species would have survived. Many biologists think most would have been lost.

Not all are celebrating Yellowstone’s birth. Some have portrayed the park as an emblem of injustice that resulted in the removal of Indigenous people from native homelands. These critics see a park which non-white citizens say they have never felt invited to embrace as part of their heritage. This needs to be addressed by the National Park Service and remedied.

What cannot be repaired, once broken, are the fragile threads of biological connections holding the ecosystem together. And those connections extend for miles outside the park boundaries, through migration trails and rivers.

These days, the boom in outdoor recreation in the West has been crowding the park’s adjacent national forests. The high numbers rival public-land use levels around Moab, Utah’s Wasatch, and the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, places that don’t have Yellowstone’s diversity of wildlife. Another threat is that neighboring states like Montana have promoted the killing of park wolves and bison when they cross Yellowstone’s invisible boundary.

Private lands surrounding Yellowstone are also getting built up, transformed by mostly unplanned development. Such development is the biggest threat to the survival of grizzlies and other park species, warns Chris Servheen, who served as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s national director of grizzly bear recovery for 35 years. Wild animals always suffer when roads, houses and people move into their territories, Servheen says. Coexistence may be the goal, but humans always win any dispute with wildlife trying to survive.

Five years ago, Dave Hallac, who managed the science division at the park, told me he was worried not just about the Yellowstone ecosystem suffering “death by 1,000 cuts,” but death by 10,000 scratches, as more people scramble for their piece of paradise. The trend has only accelerated.

What is the most enduring “value” of Yellowstone? The park reveals that humans deeply appreciate this special place of wildness. But the park also has an urgent message to those same humans: Our consumption of wild places means we must deliberately decide to accept limits. This is a good thing—and an increasingly rare thing.

Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and founder of Mountain Journal in Montana, mountainjournal.org.

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Former river guides and rangers Mark O’Neill, 67, of Chimacum, Washington, and Kim Crumbo, 74, of Odgen, Utah, didn’t return home from a Sept. 13-17 canoe-packing trip in Yellowstone National Park.

Then on Sept. 20, Mark’s body and the boat were found on the shore of Shoshone Lake. He’d succumbed to hypothermia. Kim remains missing.

We who guided in the canyon with both men, sharing our intimate knowledge of the place with thousands of visitors, have spent many hours trying to make sense of the loss.

“Damn it,” a fellow canyon guide, Jeffe Aronson, wrote me. “We live and love in a world of ghosts.”

One way we’re coping with grief is to share stories. Both men began guiding in the 1970s, going on to rack up some of the most extensive experience anyone can acquire. In the 1980s, both worked in the canyon as National Park Service river rangers.

Mark had already been a waterman all his life as surfer, lifeguard, skipper — basically “all things water,” says his sister, Toni Kelly, a former Green and Colorado River guide and ranger.

Kim Crumbo (“Crumbo” to most) served two tours in Vietnam as a Navy SEAL. By spring 1971, he was home running rivers in Utah, a place, he once told me, he had wondered if he’d live to see again.

When I asked how he’d survived two tours, the second with a platoon known for the highest casualty rates in SEAL history, he shrugged. “I had to become the scariest guy out there.”

“He’s tough,” my fellow Park Service river ranger, RuthAnn Stoner, said of Crumbo. “The toughest person I’ve ever met.”

RuthAnn and river ranger Kim Johnson remember Crumbo’s persistence on a Grand Canyon patrol where they found an injured peregrine falcon around River Mile 140. At the time, peregrine falcons were listed as endangered, with less than 30 breeding sites in the canyon. The birds were just emerging from decline throughout Arizona and the West.

Crumbo offered to do as he’d done before — row his boat 26 miles downstream to Havasu Creek, hike out to Havasupai Village and call for a helicopter evacuation. But River Unit Supervisor Curt Sauer was already on inner-canyon patrol with a Park Service helicopter pilot, and when they saw a mirror signal they landed. After a heated back-and-forth, with Crumbo insisting that the falcon — starving, its wing broken — had to be “evacuated now,” Crumbo prevailed. The falcon got its ride out, wearing a bandanna hood to keep it calm.

Later, Curt helped release the rehabilitated bird back into the wild, calling it a triumph that “wouldn’t have happened without Crumbo.”

“Crumbo just never gave up,” as RuthAnn Stoner tells it. “That same season he was jumping out of helicopters to rescue people off the rocks below Crystal Rapids after one of the big rigs flipped.” Rescues like that were all in a day’s work for both brothers.

Mark’s outstanding swiftwater rescue skills earned him awards for “courageous and professional” recovery efforts on flooding rivers and in remote forests. After leaving Grand Canyon, he continued his Park Service career in Olympic National Park, where he served 20 years until retiring in 2016.

Crumbo, too, dedicated 20 years to conservation work with the Park Service, then gave another 20 years to wilderness advocacy through the Rewilding Institute, Wildlands Network and other organizations, retiring in 2019. He also become known for his well-argued essays about climate resilience, the latest titled, “Hope in the Age of Humans.”

While many of us have found it unfathomable that a lake could make ghosts of such men, consider the lake — 12 square miles of icy, unpredictable mountain water. At the time Mark and Kim were out on it, an early snowstorm blew in on 45-mph winds, causing Shoshone Lake to surge with waves at least 2 feet high. Any boater, regardless of experience, would have survived a capsize in Shoshone’s 48-degree F water for only 20 to 30 minutes.

These “two good men,” as Curt Sauer describes them, gave their best to their families, the canyon and humanity. “Any stories we tell about them,” he says, “are love stories, pure and simple.”

Becca Lawton is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.  A former river guide and ranger, she is writing a memoir about becoming one of the first women guides in Grand Canyon.

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Just off the road stands a bull elk — a 700-pound animal with three-foot tall antlers — and a woman is standing not even four feet away from it. All it would take is for the elk to make one sudden swing of its head and the woman would be hospitalized.

“Here we go again,” I say, rolling my eyes. Then I hop out of the van, instructing my clients to wait here while I try to handle the situation.

I work as a privately contracted guide to lead visitors on wildlife and geology tours of Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. Leaning on my wildlife biology degree and six years of living in the Rocky Mountain West, I educate clients about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. At 22 million acres, it’s the largest nearly intact temperate ecosystem on earth. Almost all plants and animals that existed prior to human presence in North America still exist here today. So people flock here from all over the world to see wildlife as it is truly meant to be — wild.

“Excuse me!” I shout from the roadside, trying to get the woman’s attention. “Please back up!”

She doesn’t even flinch.

I try again. “Excuse me, woman in the white top and white hat! Please give this animal at least 75 feet of space!”

She still ignores me.

Although I do not have the authority that comes with being a park ranger, I do have George N. Wallace’s advice in his paper, Authority of the Resource. He says the average person can claim the power to confront someone whose behavior harms the environment or the public’s ability to pursue recreational activities in that environment.  If, for example, you see someone approaching wildlife too closely, you can speak up.

Far too many times this summer, I’ve had to speak up. In May, Grand Teton National Park recorded over 360,000 visitors, a 30% increase from May 2019. In July, Yellowstone had over a million visitors, a record. There’s a rule of thumb: more people mean more opportunities for them to get into trouble with wildlife.

Because some of these visitors were traveling to wild places for the first time, things sometimes went south quickly. Yet most rule-breakers were lucky enough to walk away unscathed; few even recognized the danger they were in.

But it’s heartbreaking to watch elk or bears become agitated by human ignorance. It is even more heartbreaking to know that these instances will only increase as more people visit these national parks. Wildlife may change their behavior, heading farther into the backcountry and therefore farther from view.

I love my job. I love driving around these two magnificent national parks and watching animals live their lives every day. Hearing the mating call of a bull elk echo through the valley at sunrise is nothing short of magical. Watching grizzly bears dig for food in preparation for hibernation never gets old.

Because these are experiences I want everyone to share, here are some tips for visitors:

Know the wildlife-viewing regulations of the area you visit. National parks require you to stay 25 yards away from most wildlife and 100 yards away from predators. Check relevant websites before you travel.

Follow the instructions of authority figures. Often, this will be a park or forest ranger stationed in wildlife hotspots.

Don’t block the road. Please do not stop in the middle of the road! And turn your car off so everyone can enjoy the silence.

Book a wildlife-viewing tour. While no wildlife guide will ever guarantee an animal sighting, experts know their stuff and will keep you — and the animals — safe.

Carry binoculars. This is an incredible tool for viewing wildlife from a distance. I never leave home without my pair.

Become an authority for the resource. Speak up if you see someone breaking the rules, and don’t be discouraged if you get a nasty response. You have the right to protect everyone’s access to nature.

When I return to the van after the woman finally returned to her car, my clients immediately begin expressing their disbelief.

“I’ve heard stories and seen videos of people acting like that,” one woman says, “but to see it first-hand is something else entirely.”

“You’d think people would know better,” says another.

You’d think. Kelsey Wellington is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She works as a private guide in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.

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