Might we see a return of grizzly bears to North Cascades National Park?

There are grizzly bears in the state of Washington.

The Selkirk Mountains along the state’s eastern border with Idaho house a small population that occasionally treks across the Canadian border into the other southern reaches of the larger Columbia Mountains. That population exists almost exclusively east of the Pend Oreille River, however, with sightings west of the river extremely rare.

There used to be grizzly bears all across the state of Washington.

Despite its landscape and ecosystem being a prototypical habitat for grizzlies, there have been no confirmed grizzly bear sightings in western Washington’s North Cascades National Park since 1996, some 28 years after the park itself was established and protected in 1968. It’s not as if the lone homesteading bear family finally packed up shop and left the area after listening to Beck’s Odelay one too many times – as noted by Eric Buher of the North Cascades Institute a few years ago, some 3,788 grizzly hides were exported from the Hudson’s Bay trading posts alone between 1827 and 1859.

For reference, there exists a current population of grizzlies in the lower 48 states that sits somewhere around 2,000, with almost all of those isolated to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the area in and around Glacier National Park (and Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness). As western expansion permeated the fabric of American society in the mid 1800s, so, too, came the decline of grizzlies, their habitats invaded by gold-hungry miners and trappers while loggers pilfered their forests.

They were hunted mercilessly. Perhaps just as impactful, though, was that humans pushed them into a life of dispersion and isolation that led their already infrequent breeding habits to near nil, and they simply stopped reproducing at sustainable rates anymore.

As Conservation Northwest relayed, 2014 saw the National Park Service (NPS), US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), and Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW) began officially exploring the idea of reintroducing grizzlies into the North Cascades, a National Park with ample space to house a sustainable sloth of bears. An initial environmental impact statement (EIS) was set in motion, one that would consider how grizzlies would affect life in the area for wildlife, native peoples, infrastructure, etc. under both current standards and, potentially, improvised standards that gave them more distinct protection.

The National Park Service announced on March 21st that they’d completed the final EIS on the topic, and all 416 pages of the report are now available for your perusal. And while the document is merely laying out the expected scenarios of the various decisions that could be made, it does set the stage for an actual decision that will be made on the concept in the weeks ahead.

In other words, each of the NPS, USFWS, and WDFW feel that they have effectively gathered the requisite information needed to make a call on whether or not to translocate grizzlies from elsewhere into the North Cascades, or not. Now, we get to wait to see their final decision.

It wouldn’t be the first major species reintroduction seen in the American west lately, either. Following a directive from voters in the 2020 election, Colorado Parks and Wildlife began releasing wolves back into the state in 2023, doing so independently from the NPS on a state-level for the first time in US history. Similar to the grizzly story, wolves had historically been a part of the Colorado habitat (as had grizzlies, too, but that’s another story), but they’d gradually been pushed out of the state entirely as human populations began to flood the state. The reintroduction of multiple wolves captured in Oregon is, based on similarly-run EIS, supposed to help reestablish balance within the wildlife population of the state, one that had consistently seen the predator to prey ratio skewed in an unsustainable direction.

Stay tuned!