Should Grizzly Bears Be Restored to the North Cascades?

NORTH CASCADES NATIONAL PARK—The grizzly bear looms large in the traditions of Pacific Northwest Indians, a creature both revered and almost human. It was a fixture of the natural world: a powerful predator and a source of food and stories.

Today the grizzlies of the Northwest exist mostly in legend. The few fleeting glimpses in the woods are so rare, some suspect there are no bears left in the jagged spine of the Cascade Mountains that splits Washington State.

That, however, might soon change. The federal government is starting down a road that could lead to setting the massive animals loose in North Cascades National Park. If so, it would be the first reintroduction of grizzly bears, a federally protected species—and the subject of many a backpacker’s bad dreams.

“If all things go well, bears on the ground three or four years from now,” says Mitch Friedman, executive director for Conservation Northwest, a Washington State-based environmental group and a chief proponent of bear reintroduction.

Like Yellowstone and Glacier?

The grizzly is largely extinct in most of the United States, thanks to a combination of 19th-century pelt hunting, decades of shoot-on-sight treatment, shrinking habitat, and very low reproduction.

In some spots, the bear is enjoying a comeback. Grizzly numbers have tripled to around a thousand since 1981 in Yellowstone National Park and surrounding lands, because of habitat protection and because fewer bears are being killed by people. Another thousand bears live farther north in Glacier National Park and nearby wilderness. But in four other parts of the northwestern U.S. designated as zones where grizzlies should roam, the bears either are absent or number under a hundred.