An old cowboy who’d finished loading his horses leaned out of his one-ton’s window and asked us if we’d seen any bears that day.
“Nope, just a lot of nice fish,” I said.
“Well, you’re lucky,” he replied. “Last week, I saw a grizzly up there, she was so big, her head was the size of two basketballs.”
He jammed his truck in gear and drove off, leaving my buddy Alex and I to load our fishing gear with one eye over each shoulder.
I’ve lived in Wyoming for four years now, and I’ve spent a cumulative five or six months in Alaska (including a few weeks on Kodiak Island). I make it to Yellowstone once or twice a year, and I hunt elk every fall.
But I’m seemingly grizzly bear repellant, because in all that time, I haven’t seen a grizzly in the wild. I haven’t even seen any bear in Yellowstone. And yes, before you ask, I know how to spot a grizzly. When you hunt, fish, and live in grizzly country, it’s something you become familiar with.
Grizzlies have short, rounded ears, a dished face, and a significant shoulder hump. They’re often brown, but can come in a variety of shades. Black bears have taller, pointier ears, no hump, and a straight face. I have plenty of experience with black bears, including this one I spotted last fall while elk hunting. It was chowing down on a carcass someone had shot on the opener.
I was hunting one of the few mountain ranges in Wyoming without a confirmed grizzly population, although a juvenile male was killed in the foothills last summer. It’s probably a matter of time before they cross the plains and reclaim their old habitat.
Going Back
But last week I was fishing in the heart of their territory—the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Alex and I were back at the same spot where the cowboy had told us about the gargantuan grizzly. We’ve fished here a lot the past few years, and haven’t seen anything besides deer, elk, some nice cutthroat, and brown trout pushing the two-foot mark.
The day followed a familiar pattern. We hiked a few miles from the trailhead, dropping into the river to fish a spot we’ve caught big fish from, but we both have a sneaking suspicion something larger is lurking.
From there, we walked through marginal water, hitting all the likely hiding-holes. This river is interesting in that most of it isn’t great trout habitat. It’s steep, shallow, and rocky. There’s little holding water and not much structure. But it’s packed with aquatic insects, and where the current slows up and the riverbed drops, the fish stack like cord wood. For every good hole, you might walk through five or six that aren’t deep enough, or are just too swift, to consistently hold trout.
We’d just finished with one pool and were headed to some pocket water upstream when Alex hollered from behind me, “Bear!”
I looked up in time to see a smaller, brownish bear standing in the river. It looked at us, then charged straight into the willows. It was probably 100 yards away, and the glimpse was quick enough that I wasn’t sure what I’d just seen. Had I finally seen a grizzly?
We pulled out our bear spray, started making more noise, and tried to make sense of the situation. I reckoned whatever we saw was a cub. It was too small to be anything else. That meant mamma bear wasn’t likely far away, hence the bear spray and the noise.
In all likelihood, we’d probably scared both the mom and cub, and both had hightailed it well away from us. But if it was a grizzly, we weren’t out of the proverbial woods. I wanted to keep fishing because the bear was gone and likely spooked. But the rational part of my brain won out. Was a shot at some nice trout really worth getting mauled by a mamma grizzly?
One More Day
We left the river earlier than we wanted, and argued the whole way back about whether the bear was a grizzly. I’m still not sure—my look at it was too brief to say one way or the other—but Alex is sold.
The next morning, we went back and fished a much lower section of the river. Like many in this neck of the woods, the river flows through a patchwork of public and private land, so access was tricky, but we finally made it to a public stretch without any trespassing.
Alex fished first while I got my rod rigged up. The river was maybe 20 feet wide here, and the opposite bank was thick with cottonwoods and brush. When Alex hooked up, I helped net the fish. I knelt down to pull the hook free when we heard a branch break.
We both looked up, on high alert after the previous day. There, 20 feet away, was a bear stumbling through the brush. I don’t think it saw us until I hollered “hey bear” and pulled out my bear spray.
It stood up on two legs to see what all the fuss was about. It had tall, pointy ears, a straight face, and was jet-black. Before I even slid the safety catch off the bear spray, he’d gone to all fours and shot off downstream, back to the mess of woods.
“That was definitely a black bear,” I told Alex. “So I still haven’t seen a grizzly.”
Living in grizzly country, I’m curious how long this streak will last.