Grizzly in the Bitterroot

I think it's neat they are expanding their range. Part of the push to NOT de-list the grizzly is that they are concerned about making the connection between the northern populations in the Bob Marshall and Glacier park areas and the Yellowstone and Tetons. Looks like the bears are figuring it out on their own! A couple years ago there was a grizzly bear unfortunately shot by a black bear hunter just over Highway 12 into Idaho from Montana. These are just the ones that we know about. I have a friend who is an avid sportsman and knows wildlife who lives in the Nine Mile valley about 20 miles west of Missoula. He has seen grizzly bear tracks and bears themselves near to his property.

I do believe also that it's time to de-list them and allow very limited hunting.
 
Guy on Rokslide claims he saw a sow grizzly with cubs up in the Two Bear area. mtmuley
 
Escaped just in the nick of time.


Met a gentleman and his daughter, from Stevensville, on the Sapphire side last week who assured me that there were Grizzly in the Bitterroot already. Don't let them fool ya, he told me.
 
I'm thinking that that it's really ironic that a Grizzly Bear is removed from a Federal "Wildlife" Refuge so people will be safe. Am I the only one that thinks this is absurd?
 
I grew up in Stevi, and always wondered why there was a golf course at the refuge. Mostly we just went there to make out with chicks. mtmuley
 
There have been confirmed/admitted to grizzlies in the John Longs/ Saphires for several years now and they’d been there for about a decade before that. One got into my hunting camp in 2009. FWP put up the food storage/grizzly ID signs along Rock creek two years ago. I called Jamie Junkel with FWP and he said that there was several in the area. Also, remember the one along Rock creek road eating that moose like 15 years ago?
There’s also been sporadic Grizzlies along the Idaho border up up Fish creek/Hoodoo/Lolo. Particularly in surveyor, cache, kelly creeks etc.
I saw one at Leo lake about 18 years ago with my dad. About 6 years ago somebody killed one mistakenly on the Idaho side in cache creek. This won’t be the last grizzly in the Bitterrot valley, I’ll bet.
 
The Idaho grizzly you're talking about was shot in Kelly Creek...Cache creek is in Montana.
 
I think I’ve posted it on this forum a couple times, but anytime Grizzlies in the Bitterroot come up I can’t help but think of this Bud Moore quote:

"By the mid 1940s the most noble animal had disappeared. I sensed, from experience and my own killing, that everything in those mountains was, indeed, linked to everything else. All life in the land of the Lochsa would thus shift in some way or other in reaction to the bears' passing. One could but wonder how the 'Wyakin' could continue to give strength with the grizzlies gone from the mountains. The Bitterroots had become a lesser place than they were when the grizzlies flourished. Those silvertips, you see, were a special part of the mountains' wildness. And, so far as I was concerned, no conceivable change short of their return could replace the emptiness left behind by the last of the great bears."

I like to think he’d be pleased with the news
 
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