Page 27 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest purchased a bear license, recruited a friend, and drove back to Sweetwater Creek to kill the bear. Arriving at 3 p.m., Ellsbury and his companion, John Baggs, scoured Sweetwater Creek for approximately seventy- five minutes without spotting the bear, and so decided to trawl the North Fork highway. About a quarter mile west of Sweetwater Creek they observed a bear on the opposite side of the river “about forty to fifty yards up the highway” from their truck. The two scrambled down the riverbank in a steady rain to gain a better view. They had “mostly a straight on view” as the bear moseyed through a chokecherry thicket, and Ellsbury and Baggs used 10X binoculars to observe the bear and spent “about ten minutes” discussing “the specie of the bear.” Ellsbury told investigators the bear looked dark, but apparently didn’t take into consideration that a bear of any pelage appears significantly darker when it is wet, and instead chose to focus on the appearance of the bear’s ears, which he said were “really tall.” The rain, said Ellsbury, made his 6X riflescope “a little misty,” but misty or not, when the bear tramped into the next opening Ellsbury shot it. Ellsbury told investigator Scott Browning that “he had only a couple of seconds to judge if it was a black bear or 27