Page 39 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest The yards of many in that area are over forty acres and unfenced, and so it is easy for things to show up there, from bears to wolves to poachers to Windsor energy company representatives threatening eminent domain. “Absolutely,” responded Thompson when asked if he was surprised 760 ended up in Clark. “It’s not something I would have ever imagined. The bear was relocated to the North Fork and just walked to Clark. It was associated with people, roads and rivers its whole life and so it would gravitate toward people, and really seek out human structures and human food sources.” Thompson is right in this respect, it was difficult to imagine a sub-adult grizzly walking to Clark from the borderlands of Yellowstone National Park. If 760 had been intent on exploiting “human structures and human food sources” the young grizzly had ample opportunity on the North Fork, with the clusters of lodges, dude ranches and cabins that pock the river. To get to Clark from the vicinity of Mormon Creek without encountering “human structures and human food sources” required 760 to wander away from Five Mile Meadows, cross a nearby drainage to Grinnell Creek, tromp north on the creek to enter the Absarokas, skirt Sunlight Basin for the divide, and from there stumble upon the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone and down into Clark. 39