Page 43 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest yearling grizzly there, possibly orphaned, that was relocated to the Blackrock Creek drainage in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Near that cornfield, WGFD’s hatchery is now one of the grizzly hotspots in Clark, but in reality it is unlikely to be any more active than it was over a decade ago when, every fall, a grizzly would amble through and skirt Little Rock Road on an annual foray to the fish farm. It didn’t make the local news then, nor did the grizzly that would lumber about an apple tree off road 1AB when the first frost intensified the calorie gorge, gripped and wouldn’t let go. “It’s getting so everybody’s about half-scared,” a lifelong Clark farmer informed the Tribune on the eve of Halloween. “Never used to be grizzlies out there,” he declared. In fact, there were “grizzlies out there,” just a few, but the witness evidently wasn’t looking and it wasn’t a story or a viable delisting talking point then. And before his parents had a farm and Clark had a name, and even centuries before the Nez Perce hustled through on their own Trail of Tears, there were “grizzlies out there,” lots of them. But that was before they were slaughtered so Clark would eventually attract enough settlers to have a name, and cows would supplant grizzlies and most everything else indigenous on rock, sand, 43