Return of the Grizzly

In Washington state’s North Cascades National Park, federal biologists will reintroduce grizzly bears decades after the predators were eradicated statewide

By Robert Annis
Conservation
Mar 26, 2025

A young grizzly bear pauses on a mountain trail in Wyoming’s Absaroka Range, a region where the predator’s numbers have rebounded naturally since protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1975. (Photo by Jessica Hadley)

SURROUNDED BY LUSH POPLAR AND ALDER TREES in Washington’s North Cascades National Park last summer, flycatchers and warblers tweeted their mating calls while red squirrels skittered across the trail. Deeper in the mountains, black bears likely were gorging on wild thimbleberries, and a resident pack of gray wolves may have been readying for a hunt. Still, I couldn’t help feeling as though something was missing: The park’s top predator, the grizzly bear, has been absent from this habitat since it was hunted out of existence statewide many decades ago.

But soon that will change. Last spring, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to release grizzlies to the North Cascades Ecosystem, perhaps as early as this year. If the plan succeeds, it will be the first time the federal government has reintroduced this long-threatened predator to the wild.

For thousands of years, grizzly bears (also known as brown bears) thrived in northern Washington, becoming a cultural touchstone for the Upper Skagit, Sauk-Suiattle and other Indigenous groups. But when European settlers arrived in the 19th century, they began to decimate the population—which numbered in the thousands—killing grizzlies for their pelts or out of fear the predators would prey on livestock.

“More than 3,000 grizzly hides were shipped out of the area from 1826 to 1857,” says Jason Ransom, wildlife program supervisor for North Cascades National Park. “Because grizzlies are one of the slowest reproducing land animals in the world, the population couldn’t keep up,” and over the following decades, grizzly numbers plummeted. The last confirmed sighting of a grizzly bear in Washington’s North Cascades was in 1996.

An image of the view looking south across Fisher Basin to Fisher Peak.

In 2024, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to reintroduce grizzlies to Washington state’s North Cascades Ecosystem (above), where the threatened bears were hunted out of existence decades ago.

Population crashes in Lower 48

Grizzly declines in Washington mirrored the species’ plight nationwide, as hunting and human population growth drove down numbers in all states but Alaska. In 1975, grizzlies in the Lower 48 were designated threatened under the Endangered Species Act, passed two years before.

To recover the species, as mandated by the act, federal officials in 1993 identified six potential recovery zones where bears might be reintroduced: the Greater Yellowstone, Northern Continental Divide, Bitterroot, Cabinet-Yaak, Selkirk and North Cascades ecosystems, most of them located near the U.S. border with Canada.

Some biologists believed the grizzly might return to the North Cascades on its own, as had the gray wolf, another predator exterminated by European settlers. Yet grizzlies face more challenges to naturally repopulating this region. The nearest healthy population, in southern British Columbia, is not only hundreds of miles away, but the animals’ pathway to the park is littered with dangerous roads and other human obstacles. “A lot of people were hoping that grizzlies would follow the wolves’ example,” says Christian Martin of the North Cascades Institute, a nonprofit that works with the park. “It would have made things much easier … but unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”

Federal officials released the current reintroduction plan in 2022. (More than 140,000 people commented on a 2017 draft, with nearly 90 percent in favor.) In April 2024, the government announced that the plan would move forward. After an initial release of three to seven grizzlies, federal biologists expect to introduce about the same number per year over the next five to 10 years to establish a population of 25 bears.

After that, they hope grizzly numbers will continue to grow organically. To boost the odds, between 60 and 80 percent of the introduced bears will be female; all bears selected will be between the ages of 2 and 5 years, when they are most fertile. The ultimate goal is to reach a population of 200 bears within 60 to 100 years, well under what scientists believe the ecosystem can support.

Introduced bears will be transplanted from the Northern Continental Divide or Greater Yellowstone ecosystems (where grizzlies have rebounded naturally) or from interior British Columbia (where numbers have remained strong) into remote parts of the park and surrounding wilderness areas. All released bears will be radio-collared so scientists can monitor and track them. To minimize interactions with humans, introduction sites will be roadless and offer an abundance of natural food, especially berry bushes, which are among the omnivorous animals’ most reliable nutrition sources. “A typical adult bear needs 20,000 calories a day, which is about the equivalent of 78 pounds of blueberries,” Ransom says.

A mother grizzly bear leads her cubs across a meadow in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where a healthy grizzly population will supply some of the bears that will be released in the North Cascades, perhaps as soon as this year.

Support and opposition

Scientists expect reintroduced grizzlies to be a boon to the North Cascades Ecosystem. Not only are the big bears known for keeping deer and other wildlife populations in balance, they also keep those prey animals moving throughout the habitat, allowing at-risk plant species to recover from possible overgrazing. Through their feces, grizzlies also help native plants disperse their seeds.

Despite such benefits and support during the public comment period, some individuals and groups are fighting the reintroduction. Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe Chair Nino Maltos II told The Seattle Times that while his people and the bears long coexisted, the Tribe fears the reintroduction could impact human safety and prosperity today, with bears potentially encroaching on the salmon spawning grounds near people’s homes, or endangering Tribe members hunting or foraging for berries. “We’re advocating for the way of life we have currently,” he said.

The Upper Skagit Indian Tribe also coexisted with North Cascades grizzlies for millennia. Scott Schuyler, the Tribe’s policy representative for natural and cultural resources, says his people welcome the chance to do so again. “In addition to the grizzly being one of the many spirit power animals of the Tribe, as an Indigenous Nation, we value all creatures of the landscape and defend their right to exist,” he says. “The return of the grizzly bear brings hope … that we can bring creatures back that have been removed from our ecosystem by humans’ hand.”

But Chelsea Hajny, executive vice president of the Washington Cattlemen’s Association, argues that with an estimated 46,000 grizzlies living in Canada and Alaska, as well as an additional 2,000 roaming the western half of the Lower 48, the grizzly population has recovered sufficiently without adding bears into locales from which they’ve been absent for at least 30 years.

“While [our organization] strives to be collaborative, we have grave concerns with the grizzly bear introduction,” she says. “Bears have the potential to be destructive ... and they pose a risk not just to livestock but to human life as well.” (In 2017, an estimated 232,308 head of cattle grazed in the seven counties surrounding the release zone.)

An image of tracks from a grizzly bear and her yearling cub on a dirt road.

Tracks from a grizzly bear and her cub in Yellowstone National Park hint at the enormous size of the animals.

An unwarranted bad rap

Indeed, when people hear the word “grizzly,” many feel some amount of trepidation or fear, possibly due to old stereotypes about the animals being ruthless killing machines. Yet most experts agree that the bears, while potentially dangerous, get an undeserved bad rap.

“The media and Hollywood fuel the fear and misconceptions of grizzly bears, making them out to be on the hunt for humans,” says Daryl Dancer, a bear guide and instructor for the Commercial Bear Viewing Association of British Columbia. “Bears just want to go about their day, avoiding humans, looking for food to prepare for hibernation and [raising] their cubs without interruption. Bears are actually very tolerant of humans, considering millions of park visitors go traipsing through their living rooms without incident each year.”

She and other bear authorities say most Cascades park visitors would never even see a grizzly, especially in the early stages of reintroduction. After all, by the end of the decade, only 25 bears are expected to be roaming an ecosystem that covers about 9,800 square miles, larger than the state of New Jersey.

Even less likely than seeing a grizzly, they say, are the odds a visitor would be attacked by one of the animals—a 1 in 2 million chance, the National Park Service estimates. According to a 2019 paper in Scientific Reports, there are fewer than a dozen grizzly attacks on humans a year in North America. About two-thirds of the attacks are defensive in nature.

Unlike a black bear, which tends to run away if it feels threatened by a human, a larger, stronger grizzly may fight. Most of the time, that happens when a person stumbles between a mother bear and her cubs, comes across a carcass a bear is guarding, or after a bear is antagonized by a dog that then runs back to its owner. But according to David Garshelis, co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Bear Specialist Group, the majority of grizzlies will remain hidden if a human approaches and is unaware of the animal’s presence.

Outside the North Cascades park visitor center, in a nearby convenience store and at trailheads last June, feelings about the upcoming grizzly return were by and large positive. “This land was [the grizzlies’] home for so long, I think it’s great they’re coming back,” said Damian Brown, who was visiting from Coupeville, Washington, with his family. “Bears don’t naturally attack people, so we’re not afraid.”

Morgan Begay, who lives in Newhalem, which borders the park, agreed. “As a Native American, our culture teaches us to take care of this place, these plants and animals, as if they’re our own,” Begay said. “If you respect and not bother [the grizzlies], they’ll respect and not bother you.”

An image of a brown bear taking a seat at a picnic table.

Despite their reputation as fierce hunters, grizzlies are opportunistic omnivores, feeding on a wide range of foods, from carrion to berries to human leftovers scavenged from garbage cans and abandoned picnics.

Please don’t feed the bears

Such lack of concern among visitors could create its own problems, however. Later that same day, two rangers visited the park’s Colonial Creek campground, pointing out campsites where visitors had abandoned unprotected food. Resident black bears are known to raid such sites to grab easy meals. Although grizzlies will be released far from campgrounds and other populated areas, there is a risk of a dangerous human encounter if one of these larger predators—whose home range can extend up to 380 square miles—wanders into a campsite and discovers a similar smorgasbord. “Prevention is worth much more than a response” to a bear problem, Ransom says. “We want to keep our junk food a secret, because once they discover it, it’s so hard to retrain a bear.”

To prevent potential human–bear encounters, educating park visitors and the public will be a top priority, with rangers sharing tips on proper food preparation and storage, as well as recommending hiking in groups, making noise on the trail and carrying bear spray, just in case. Because each of the introduced bears will be radio-collared, park biologists will be able to track them multiple times a day and hopefully keep them out of any trouble.

If a bear does get a taste of human food, Ransom says, it’s crucial for the animal to be quickly negatively trained—scared away with noise, physical deterrents such as nonlethal projectiles or chased off by specially trained Karelian bear dogs.

It’s nearly impossible to change a bear’s behavior after the second or third incident, he adds. In those cases, it would have to be euthanized. Because the relocated grizzlies will be considered a “nonessential experimental population” under the Endangered Species Act, officials will be allowed to relocate or kill the protected predators, if absolutely necessary.

“We want to ensure every available tool—from hazing to translocation to issuing a permit to kill a bear—is in the toolbox,” Ransom says. “We want to do everything possible for people and bears to coexist.”

Ranchers also will be authorized by federal agencies to wound or kill a bear that has attacked livestock or working dogs on private land. To prevent that from happening in the first place, the government will offer landowners grants for bear-deterrent assistance, including funding to buy electric fences to protect unattended livestock and guidance on proper removal of livestock carcasses that might attract hungry grizzlies.

Dancer believes that most bears already know how to coexist with humans. “It’s up to us to change our attitudes, language, understanding and habits to learn how to coexist with them,” she says.

NWF priority

Affiliates in Action

A founding member of the Friends of the North Cascades Grizzly coalition, Conservation Northwest, a National Wildlife Federation affiliate, has supported reintroducing threatened grizzly bears to the North Cascades Ecosystem for the past decade. Coalition efforts have included recruiting more than 160,000 comments in support of grizzly recovery. Learn more.

Robert Annis is an outdoor writer based in Indiana.