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Once the containers are full of goodies, Gravatt gets them in front of the bears, which poke, prod, claw, bite, smash, and sometimes use what he calls “the CPR method,” wherein bears place their front paws atop a container and pump, almost as if they’re trying to revive the unfortunate object. “They don’t really like mushrooms or onions,” Gravatt says, adding that the bears will eat just about anything else in their quest to pack in around 15,000 calories per day during the summer (more when they’re getting ready to hibernate). “When bears become unafraid of humans, there’s potential harm to us, too.”Įvery spring, Gravatt begins filling coolers, bike panniers, backpacking canisters, and trash dumpsters sent in by big-name manufacturers like Yeti, Cabela’s, Pelican, and Igloo with veggies, dry dog food, fish, honey, and-the bears’ favorites-peanut butter. “It’s not just for the bears’ sake,” Gravatt says. They have an important job to do: they test containers to determine whether they’re bear-resistant. Spirit, a female grizzly, couldn’t stay away from a golf course in Whitefish she was relocated six times-once as far as 100 miles away, but she kept finding her way back to that easy source of food-before one of her cubs was hit by a car and she was taken to the West Yellowstone facility.Ĭoram, Spirit, and the six other bears that live at the GWDC aren’t just wasting away in captivity, though. Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officials trapped him three times before he ended up at the GWDC. In that case, says Randy Gravatt, the GWDC’s container testing coordinator, bears typically have to be euthanized.)Ĭoram, a male grizzly whose weight fluctuates between 550 and 680 pounds depending on the season, wandered through Kalispell, Montana, checking porches for dog kibble. (Unfortunately, due to the center’s limited capacity, the answer is frequently that it can’t take another bear.

When a wildlife official from anywhere in the American West, Alaska, or Canada has a nuisance grizzly bear and wants to avoid euthanizing it, the GWDC is often near the top of their call list. It is also home to three small packs of captive-born wolves, a handful of injured raptors, and five American river otters. The center is a nonprofit educational facility that houses grizzly bears unable to survive in the wild for one reason or another. Nearly every bear at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center (GWDC) in West Yellowstone, Montana, has a similar backstory. In other words: they start getting into trouble. “That’s when they start doing un-beary things,” Larson says. “It’s a huge payoff for relatively little effort, compared to spending hours picking berries.” The bear that broke into our camp kitchen was constantly doing a risk analysis-no matter how much she didn’t want to interact with humans, she was too tempted by the reward to stay away. “A bear that breaks into someone’s campsite now understands that they can get this really calorie-dense food,” he explains. That incident was a textbook case of food conditioning, according to wildlife biologist Wes Larson, who researches human-bear conflict.

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We’d assumed our supplies would be safe from intruders, but the flimsy windows were no match for a hungry bear.

Two other counselors were already there, surveying the wreckage: a broken window, boxes of food strewn across the linoleum floor, burst bags of hot cocoa mix, and a maze of chocolaty paw prints. One morning around 5:30, after a particularly long night of comforting tearful, homesick tweens, I dragged myself into the kitchen for coffee.

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After a stern talking-to about what might happen if anyone went to bed with a snack in their sleeping bags-bears, people!-we’d zip the kids into their tents for the night, lock up the cabin containing our kitchen, and try to catch a few hours of sleep. When I was 23, I spent a summer working as a counselor at an overnight camp for eight-to-12-year-olds near the central mountain town of Genesee, Colorado.