Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Grizzly Bear Attack - Night of the Grizzly: Part 3 - The Aftermath

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

Third and final episode of Night of the Grizzly. Wes walks us through the immediate aftermath of the worst night in the history of Glacier National Park, and how it completely altered how we look at and deal with grizzly bears, as well as how much needed to change in park visitor safety. If you haven't heard parts 1 and 2 yet, we strongly recommend you do, as Wes prepared like a man possessed to tell the story as accurately as possible. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone, this is Wes again, here to introduce our third part of the Night of the Grizzly series. We're finally wrapping up. Just a quick recap, the first episode we talked about the Granite Park Chalet mauling. That unfortunately culminated in the death of Julie Helgeson and her companion Roy Duccott was mauled pretty bad during that one. The second episode we talked about Michelle Coons and the bear that killed her up at Trout Lake, which is just about eight miles from where the Granite Park Chalet is. This third episode, we're going to talk a lot about the aftermath of these two attacks. We're going to talk about the search for Michelle Coon's body and the search for the responsible bears. It's a really interesting episode.

We're going to talk a lot about what bear was probably responsible for each of these deaths and the changes that this really crazy coincidence ignited in the National Park Service and throughout the country. So it's a really, hopefully it's an episode that just kind of ties everything together. My brain is totally fried. I feel like there's a lot more other stuff I wanted to say about this, but I think I'm just going to go ahead and introduce the third episode. So here it is the third part of Night of the Grizzlies. So welcome back, everyone.

It's only been a week. We're pumping them. We're just pumping content out. Yeah. Just pumping. Anyways, this is part three of Night of the Grizzly. We're Tooth and Claw podcast. I'm Wes Larson.

I'm joined here by Jeff Larson and Mike Smith, my noble co-hosts, and we're talking about animal attacks. That's what we do on this podcast. Hold on, Wes. Hold on. Yeah. Who are you? And why the heck should we care what you have to say about anything? That's a good question, Mike. I am a wildlife biologist. I got my master's in bear conflict prevention, studies, et cetera. And I've specialized in both polar bear human conflict and black bear human conflict. And now I'm working in grizzly bear human conflict and sloth bear human conflict. So I wanted to start this podcast with the hopes of teaching people about how they can safely go out into the great outdoors, enjoy wildlife, and learn from these really negative experiences that other

people have had. Jeff also has helped with some of my bear work. He was a tech on the Black Bear Project. And Mike doesn't give a shit about animals, but he slowly is starting to run. really care about them. Fuck them. Almost, I would say, as much as us. Anyway, that's who we are. That's what the podcast is all about. And, you know, we're learning a lot as we do it, too, which I think is really important.

I've learned, yeah, at least seven things so far. You have. That's pretty good. I've noticed that. I counted once, and it was at least seven. Yeah. That's more than we ever could have hoped for or dreamed for. I don't have much to talk about, guys.

because my head's just been in this night of the grizzlies. We got a lot to get through, so let's just get into it. Actually, though, so you've been doing like a pretty bad job so far, I think, on these last two because we got a lot of questions about like what's going on and what could have been done differently. So do you want me to start out just kind of like telling you what people have been asked about these last two episodes and then you can kind of tell us what you're going to cover and whatnot? I'd love to do that. I'd love to just ask.

No, I'm just kidding. He's been doing great. Because I'll take that if that's criticism. I just, yeah, I think you could have explained a lot of this already. Should we just go through the first two stories again in excruciating detail? So people know what we're going to be talking about in this one. Yeah, buckle up. This episode's going to be six hours long.

No, I'm just messing with him. But I did do listener questions today and we're going to do it a little different because we just got so many about this Night of the Grizzly episode that we're going to do all the ones pertaining to it first and kind of like see what we cover as we go through. Cool. And then like see what we should cover before we get started too. Okay. Yeah.

So we'll just go quick through it. So this is from Jamie White and she wants to know how should of the National Park handled the behavior before it killed the girls. Yeah. It's a really good question. It is something we'll talk about a little. bit today, and we have talked about a little bit in the other episodes. But I do want to, I just want to, like, say a little kind of disclaimer before that that the National Park didn't have the

information that we have now. So anything I say about how they should have handled it comes from another 50 years of science that we have about bear attacks, and we've learned a lot since then. But if we were to, if we had that information back then, what they should have done is immediately removed those bears. And before that, before it even got to that point, what they should have done is secured all attractants in the park and made it so. No one was leaving trash anywhere. No one was feeding bears. And these bears had no opportunities to get trash or human food. And then, so Nikki Mereville, she wants to know from part two, if the bear was eating so much human food, why was it so thin? And they always like kind of described it as skinny. Yeah. You know, I had that as like a

comment that we are going to get to later, but I'll just answer it now because we had someone else ask that question to one of our patrons. I thought of it too, so give me credit. Okay, also you. Jeff also needs credit for that one. But it was Nikki and then Alouette 13. Anyway, they both bring up a really good question, like, why is this bear so skinny if it's eating human food? And the thing to remember is that bears during the summer are consuming a really high number of calories like 6,000 calories a day. And then in the fall, and even in August when this happened, they're starting to get into hyperphasia where they're trying to put on a ton of weight. During that time, they're trying to eat like 20,000 calories a day. So even if this bear is

picking through trash, it's just not going to get the calories that it needs to be really healthy unless it stumbles across like a whole side of a pig or something that someone chucked out. So that food is like really attractive to them because it is calorie dense. But as they're picking through the trash, they might not be able to get a ton of it. So they're not actually going to put on a ton of weight. So it's more bang for your buck. But it's not like a bear that might be out. Yeah, must and less buck.

Like a bear that's out in a berry patch can literally eat all day long. And it'll like over time get a lot more calories. They eat a lot of berries, like vast. Yeah, they eat like hundreds of thousands of them. And it's not. But then a bear picking through trash will get like a lot of calories, but in a little short bursts. Yeah. And then if like a bear in the wild stumbles upon a carcass or something, like a bison carcass or an elk carcass or something, or if it kills something, then it all of a sudden has like a bonanza and they can put on a ton of weight. So the answer to that question is really just that it was just getting scraps out of the trash and out of campsites and stuff.

It was never, as far as I read, it was never just getting like a feast. And that's why they weren't just putting on a ton of weight. Um, from Miss Molly Mack, How risky is a two-person hike in bear territory with Bear Spray? Should we avoid or go? You should go. You'll be fine. Definitely go. We don't want to make anyone, like, scared to be out in the wilderness and bear country.

It's beautiful. Yeah. Go enjoy it. Yeah. Like, just follow our tips and, like, listen to what we've said and you're going to be totally fine. And Jeff, really quick, the previous question about them not being fat, the ones that were at Granite Park Chalet, like the two males that were eating.

eating every single night and getting like a decent amount of food. Those ones were probably getting like pretty big. And actually, I shouldn't say males because in this episode we're going to learn that they weren't males. But they were getting like they were getting bigger and more healthy because they were getting constant food. Okay. Callie Garcia wanted to know once a bear's food conditioned, is it possible to retain them? Sometimes it's pretty tricky. That old adage that a fed bear is a dead bear, unfortunately is generally true. Like usually when they get into human food, it puts them on the path of getting into enough trouble

that they're going to get shot, either by managers that need to kill them because they're getting in too much trouble or by people whose houses they're trying to break into or yards they're trying to get into. But every once in a while, though, they manage to like kick the habit. It's like a gateway drug to...

Yeah, sometimes it does happen, but often they end up dead. Okay. From Ashley and Barker 22, I know Bear Spray is best, but would playing music very loudly at your campsite deter bears? Yeah, it definitely helps. It's annoying. Yeah, especially if there's other people at the lake or something. Yeah, like I'm never going to tell anyone in a public campsite to play loud music because it's really annoying. So if you're positive that no one else is in earshot, yeah, that's probably going to help keep bears away from your campsite.

But I would never recommend it because it's really annoying. annoying. One thing that someone wrote in and said that they, what they do is when they're car camping, they sleep with their keys. And if they hear a bear or something, they'll just hit, they would hit the panic button on their keys so their car starts honking really loud. Oh, interesting. I thought that was a really good idea. And that would probably work. And then this is the one where I was like, man, Wes has been doing a bad job. Yeah. Is Lucas Vorenzen wants to know why are most bear attacks, black bear attacks, if they are nicest type of bear.

They're not. Most bear attacks aren't black bear attacks. It's that... And they're not the nicest type of bear either. They are. Pandas. Well, they're the nicest that we have in North America. What I said is that in this episode back then, when bears were being fed at large in

national parks, it was mostly black bear attacks. But most of those attacks were just like people getting bit on the hand or something when they're trying to feed a black bear. Or we talked about the one in our early black bear yellow... or episode where the woman in Yellowstone got her boobs raked off when the bear like kind of braced itself on her to fall to the ground. It was stuff like that, like stupid little attacks that were happening because people were feeding black bears,

and black bears were just much more likely to come take food out of people's hand. These days, like, there are more black bear incidents still probably, but they're again, like generally very minor compared to grizzly bear attacks. And that's just like black bears in way more places than grizzly. Exactly. That's what I was about to say. It's just because there's 800,000 black bears. And we have in the U.S., in the lower 48, we have like maybe 2,500 grizzly bears. Like most states have black bears, right? Like more states do than don't. Yeah. There's more than double the amount of black bears than every other bear species combined. So like if you combine the other seven bear species, there's double the amount in black bears. Oh, wow. That's.

Yeah. So it's like. Black bears far outnumber any other bear in the world. Eight times more ants than humans. That's true. There's a lot more ants. Good point. Plus there's like eight. There's eight pandas out there.

No, there's way more than that what I said. Ants way eight times more than humans. Yeah, ants. If you like totaled them up. All right. So I'm just kidding. I think you've done a great job and we're just clearing up some stuff. Should we get into what you have prep now that we've cleared up some questions in one and two?

We've cleared up those questions. I'll try and redeem myself in this episode. With no further ado, we are going to get to part three of Night of the Grizzly. So are you guys ready for it? You ready to wrap this thing up, put a cork in it? Oh, yeah. I sure am. What do I need to be ready?

Did you stretch? I didn't prep. You don't, you never do. Pop quiz. I'm ready. And also, I just think this is a fun story, and I'm really happy to, to wrap it up. Yeah. Okay. So this one we're titling the aftermath. I mentioned in the first episode as the book goes on, the book written by Jack Olson, Night of the Grizzlies, he kind of bounces

back and forth between the two attacks and the timeline just switches between the two. I decided to break it up to where I did the whole Granite Park Shaleigh attack in episode one. We did the whole trout lake attack in episode two. But for this third episode, I am going to bounce back and forth between the two. So I'll make that clear to you guys, but just so you don't get lost, we're going to be talking about both attack sites now in this third episode. So we're going to start with Granite Park Shaleigh. If you remember from episode one, we ended on Julie Helgeson being pronounced dead. And right after she was pronounced dead, her body was covered up, they actually strapped it to one of the landing trays of the helicopter. And not long after that, the helicopter took off and it

headed for a coroner in Callispell. So Granite Park Shaleigh still had these occupants there. And and they were just standing around in basically like stunned silence. And they're trying to process what just happened over the preceding hours. And a lot of them kind of just quietly went off to their rooms, while others like Father Connolly, the priest and his companion Steve Pierre, they sat outside in some chairs outside the chalet and just kind of stared off into the darkness and got lost in their own thoughts. Like a little bit in shock maybe?

Yeah, I think everyone was kind of in shock. Yeah, I would be. Yeah, totally. especially if you were like, like Father Connolly was literally holding Julie's hand as she died. So Joan Devereaux, she again was the young ranger naturalist that had kind of had to take charge of that whole situation. She was already making plans for what happened the next day. And she told her a whole big group of participants on her hike that they should get some sleep and that the group would be leaving at 9 a.m. to hike out from the chalet and to go down to the trailhead.

And then after she told them that she like started tidying up this little makeshift operating area, that they had constructed. And then she went to sleep. And when she went to sleep, she actually had nightmares of being charged over and over again by a grizzly bear. Tom Walton, who again was the chalet manager, he got on the radio and he was hoping that he would be able to talk to his boss, who's named Ross. Boss Ross.

I just put that together. He ended up reaching the main dispatch for the park, and he told them that he needed to talk to Ross and that there had been a bear attack. And the dispatcher got really mad at him and told him to be quiet and not to talk about the attack on the main channel. And so not long after that, Ross actually called him on a private channel and told him that he would be at the chalet in a few hours. So that's what's happening at the Granite Park Chalet. They're kind of just taking stock and trying to get everything organized for the next day. And when was that would have been around like two in the morning?

Is that kind of when everything was happening? No, this is like 4 a.m. 4 a.m. Julie Helgison died at like right after. after 4 a.m. And this is like the hour or two after that. Okay, gotcha. So now going back to Trout Lake, not far away at Lake McDonald, seasonal ranger Leonard Landa was having a really hard time sleeping as well. He had heard the radio traffic about the bear attack at the chalet, and he knew that a girl was missing. And then he like actually volunteered to go help find her. But every other

ranger in Lake McDonald was out fighting fires, and he was told to like stay put because he was the only ranger at the station. And not long after that, he heard. that a helicopter had been called to the chalet, and then not long after that, he heard that there was a call to alert the coroner in Callispell. So he learned that this girl had obviously died, and he knew that the streak of no human fatalities from bears in the park was over. So he's wondering if it might be this bear that had been causing trouble all summer at Kelly's camp in Trout Lake. And more than once, he had grabbed his 300 Winchester and, like, headed to Kelly's camp to kill that particular bear. But the bear always took off as soon as he was.

as it heard his engine approaching. We talked about that a little bit in the last episode. But he also, like, he had been told to kill this bear, but he knew that no one in the park really wanted to kill the bear, and that it was kind of just them telling him to do it just so they didn't have any liability. Yeah. And he figured that this, this problem bear that they were dealing with at Kelly's camp and Trout Lake would just, the problem would just kind of fix itself. But recently, the bear had been causing a lot of problems at Trout Lake, and it even been featured in newspapers, and he was starting to really worry about it. How far are the two attacks, like, distance-wise, from each other?

Eight miles as the crow flies. Okay. So not very far. You know Heaven's Peak? Like a bear pretty much goes the same way as the crow flies, right? Yeah, they tend to take, like, the root of least resistance. But, you know, when you're driving up the going to the Sun Road, there's Heaven's Peak, that really big mountain, right as you go around the loop, it's to the left.

Yeah. That's what separates these two attacks. It's pretty significant at least. It is. It's a big peak. It's like a big natural barrier. We all have that dream trip. We've been wishing we could go on.

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Go to your happy price. Priceline. So this ranger Leonard Landa, he's up late. He's thinking about this girl that's been killed at the chalet. He's thinking about their bear that he's been having all these problems with. And he's really feeling like there's this pressure cooker building. And he's thinking like, oh, has our bear gone all the way over to the Granite Park Chalet? And then he also knew that they're feeding bears at the chalet.

And he realized like, okay, it's probably not our bear. it was probably one of these bears that they had been feeding, and he finally managed to fall asleep. Yeah. So at 8.30 in the morning, he's getting ready for his workday, Leonard Landa. He was half right. Yeah, exactly. When he hears the sound of people running across the flat rocks outside of his office,

and he could tell by how quickly they were running that something was really wrong. So as he hears this, suddenly Roy and Ray Nosek, Denise Huckle, and Paul Dunn spill into his office. And if you remember, they're the survival. from the night at Trout Lake. And they're all talking simultaneously, and they're all in a panic, and some of them are actually physically shaking in fear still. And Landa just can't figure out what they're saying. So finally he points at Ray and he yells,

wait, you talk and you tell me what happened. So Ray is still shaking, and he goes through the events of the night, and he tells Land about the bear how it entered their camp and how they all climbed trees. And while he's speaking, Landa's like starting to remember them because they had got a fire permit from him, the day before. And he stops him.

He cuts Ray off and he says, wait, where's the other girl? And Ray says, she's still up there. The bear dragged her away. So, Landa can hardly believe what he's hearing. That's like, I know that they were, like, you can't follow anyone

who's just been through that. But it's like, that's what I think I would lead with. Yeah, they buried the lead. Someone died by a bear. He's like, well, we all climbed trees. Mine was a spruce. His was a fur.

He's like, our tent is still. up there? No. Anyway. I get that it would be hard to organize their thoughts. They were all in total shock. Yeah. But he's, so Land is just, what's it?

The bear ate our cookies. Land is, he's in like a state of disbelief. He had just spent this whole night thinking about the Trout Lake Bear, listening to the radio about a different bear death, and now it's happening again. So it feels really surreal. And he tells Paul and Roy, the two younger boys, Paul's 16, I think Roy's like 21, that they're going with him and that they're going to go check out the campsite. And he tells Ray to take Denise home.

And Landa says maybe Michelle's okay. Maybe she climbed a tree. Maybe she's fine. And Paul like really somberly says she didn't climb a tree. But Landa tells them like they didn't know that and they had to go look. He radios the chief rangers office and he tells them a girl's missing at Trout Lake, a bear was likely to blame. and the Chief Ranger Station receptionist or whoever he was talking to says another one and he tells them that it looked that way and then the people responded to him and said

okay be careful bring your rifle and at that point he's already loading his rifle he's ready to go so land up paul in Jurassic Park yeah um Muldoon these little khaki shorts oh he said even Nedry knew better to let the raptors out um landa Paul and Roy head up trail toward trout lake and along the way they meet a man on horseback that was headed to the lake to do some fishing. This guy's name is Andy Sampson. Not Andy Samburg, Andy Sampson. No relation. So Landa tells Sampson what they're doing and he tells them that Sampson would have to stay behind them. And he didn't want Sampson to like get there before them and find the scene and maybe stumble on a

potentially angry grizzly bear. But Sampson didn't really take them that seriously. And he even tries to pass them a couple times, but Landa would like get in the path and block him from passing them. So not long after they get to the lake and they can clearly see the destroyed camp. And when Samson sees this, he suddenly is a believer and he pulls a long-handled axe from its sheath and he's gripping it like ready to go. So the group spreads out. Yeah, and my axe. Exactly. And then he smashes it down on the ring and it shattered into a hundred pieces. As the group spread out, they start heading toward the campsite and they're softly calling Michelle's name while they searched. And as they reached the campsite, Paul points at a bare spot of earth and he tells Landa that's

where Michelle was. And the spot's like completely clear. There's no signs that the girl or even a sleeping bag was ever there. So Landa asked Paul if he was sure and Paul says that he's absolutely positive. And then he points up the hill and he says that's where the bear carried her. So slowly the four of From Landa, the two boys, and Andy. Well, the bear spot of Earth is where the bear is, right? What do you mean? Oh, I get what you're saying. The bear spot.

There we go. Let's get all the puns out now. Let's get them all out now. Okay, this part's pretty crazy. The four of them start making their way up the hill, and Landa's got his rifle cocked. He puts a bullet into the chamber. And as he crosses the trail,

he notices something white on the ground that catches his eye. And he picks it up, and immediately he recognizes that it feels, like human flesh. And then suddenly it dawns on Landa that he's holding a severed human ear. And he is like totally shocked and he quietly comes to his realization

that the ear is not ragged or bloody or anything but it looks like it's been surgically removed and that a human ear detached from the body doesn't look like an ear. Like it looks very alien. Interesting. So he calls to the others and he tells them what he's found and all of them kind of, you know,

get pale in their faces, but they all remain resolute in their search. And this hope that they might find Michelle alive is now completely gone. You think they're finding parts of a brain. I was going to say the reservoir dog thing. Like in Almost Heroes. Or Reservoir Dogs. There's truly in Almost Heroes this exact situation happens. That's right.

A bear malls a guy. You even talked about this. They find his ear and then they call for him. What's his name? I can't remember. Anyway, I don't think they did that. All right, they continue to head up the hill, and this path of kind of destruction leads into the dark spruce forest

and all this moss, and it's really kind of a creepy place to go looking for, potentially a carcass that a bear might be guarding. So not long after they find the shredded sleeping bag, and then they find a jacket and a blouse, and both are totally soaked in blood, and Land is bending down to look at these articles of clothing when he hears one of the boys yell, here she is.

So I'm going to read direct from the book about the description of how they found Michelle Coons. Okay. The ranger dropped the clothing and rushed up the hillside, almost tripping over two large logs before coming to the depression in the earth that marked where grizzlies or humans or both had once buried food in garbage.

The sky was almost shut out by a canopy of spruce trees. There was squaw hair, lichen, grizzly hair, everywhere, and some of the trees were losing their prism. purchase in the thin soil and beginning to angle down toward the earth, mingling their upper branches with the tops of thimbleberry and mountain ash bushes. Inexplicably, Landa found himself thinking how peaceful the scene was, and then he reached the boy's side and looked down at the remains of Michelle Coons. The girl was on her back and mutilated beyond recognition. Landa could hardly tell that she was female. Her stomach and abdomen were gone, and the hair missing from her head.

The ranger covered his face with his hands and backed down the hill into the approaching Andy Samson. Don't leave the two boys up there alone, the fisherman said. But Landis' face was pale, and it took him a few minutes to pull himself together. So pretty bad. It's not a scene that you want to stumble on. Some of the guys in Yellowstone that I work with have responded to fatalities, like people being killed by bears, and it sounds like it's not something that you want to do. It's pretty grim. Yeah, that feels like something that would stick with you for a while. It does. was on the fence, but now hearing you say that, I'm going to say, no, I don't want that to happen. All right.

Okay, we're going to go back to Granite Park now. Back in the chalet, Robert Klein, so Robert Klein again was the husband that had camped out near the trail cabin. He was talking with Dr. Lindan. And he asked the doctor if he thought they could have saved the girl had they found her more quickly. And the doctor responded that he didn't know, but that it was likely she wouldn't have lost so much blood. and Dr. Lindan walked away and Robert Klein remembered thinking that he'd never seen someone look so sad. So Tom Walton's busy feeding the guests and this plan for them to leave at nine was going out the window. But around 11, Joan, the ranger naturalist, wrangled up all the guests that would be leaving with her

and roughly 60 people headed out with her down the trail. As they headed down the trail, they encountered Francis Elmore, who was the chief naturalist of the park as well as three other rangers. These men were armed and they were headed toward the chalet. They had not seen any bears on their hike up, but the big group made sure to sing and make a ton of noise as they walked out on this four-mile hike back down to the road. When they reached the road, they saw signs that were put up on the trail saying that the trail and the chalet were closed due to an aggressive bear.

And Joan got into a car that would be her ride back to her trailer. And as she was riding back to her trailer, the driver told her that another bear had killed another girl in the park that night And she just assumed that this driver was confused, that he was talking about the Granite Park Bear. And she was so tired at this point that she didn't bother arguing, but she just went back home. Yeah. Okay. So now we're going to go back to...

I'd probably think the same thing, honestly. Yeah, I'd just be like, this dude's confused. Yeah. So back at Trout Lake, Bert Gildart was a 27-year-old ranger who's famous for being eager to spend as much time as possible in the backcountry. He was also known for being really good with a rifle. and both of those things led to him having a pretty good reputation in the park, and he got a telephone call in the morning of August 13th. He was told that a girl had been killed by a bear at the chalet,

and that another girl was missing at Trout Lake, likely the victim of a different grizzly bear attack, and that he would need to join Leonard Landa in search for the missing girl. He was told that Landa would be waiting for him, and that Landa would have guns for both of them. And if you remember this name, it's because Burt Gildart was actually one of the rams. Rangers that had visited the Granite Park Chalet a few nights before.

And he and Dave Shea had seen the female with Cubs outside the chalet that night. So he was the ranger that was there that left in like the middle of the night with Dave Shea. And they're the two that saw the female with Cubs. If you like had me guess just like a random person named Bert, if they're good with a rifle, I would guess yes. Yeah. Yeah, you think so? Just Bert's a real rifle name for you.

Person who knows guns. Isn't Bert the guy with a cell? are full of guns and tremors. I think his name is Bert. Reba McIntyre husband. I think he might be right. So Gildart, Bert, I'm going to call him Gildart for most of this. He gets to Lake McDonald, Ranger Station,

and he had actually just missed Landa, who had set out earlier with the boys. And there's no spare rifle at the station, so he grabs an axe and he runs up the trail. And when he gets to Trout Lake, he sees that a helicopter's landing on the lake. Not long after he hears the boy yell that they found the body of the girl,

and he takes a rifle from the ranger in the helicopter, and he goes to inspect the body with Leonard Landa. And they end up covering Michelle's body, they place it in the helicopter, and the body's flown out. And now Roy Nosek and Paul Dunn, they gather up their remaining belongings, and they head back toward the trailhead with Andy Sampson and his horse, and then Landa and Gildart have a lot of work to do still,

and they get their rifles, and they go about making sure that no one else is in this area, and no one else could potentially be in danger. So they knew that there was some park employees that were using the cabin at Arrow Lake, and Arrow Lake's about a mile up trail from Trout Lake. So they carefully walk up the trail, the whole way they're scanning for this bear,

and they find four employees, two girls and two boys, as well as a father and a son, who were actually the father and son who had been treed by this bear a few days ago. Oh, wow. So they tell the whole group that there's grizzly trouble and that they need to get out of there,

and this father and son need to be. no convincing. They're like, okay, we're out of here. We don't want to be with this bear. Yeah, they were, I'm surprised they were still there. But these two male park employees don't want to leave. They want to stay. So Land is pretty frustrated and he tells them they have to go. And when they still refuse to leave, he calmly tells them that a girl had just been killed by a grizzly bear just down the trail. So this gets them moving. And less than an hour later, the whole group's headed down the trail toward the trailhead. Landon, Gildart are with them. They have their rifles ready to go. They get back to the trailhead and they go back to the ranger station and they're told to get some

sleep and report back to headquarters in the morning. Okay. Granite Park Chalet. So the four Rangers that had gone to the chalet were armed with rifles. They included Francis Elmore, who is the chief naturalist for the park. He would actually be responsible for interviewing the chalet staff and inspecting the attack site. He wasn't necessarily responsible for killing. any bears. Robert Wassum, who is a park biologist, he was in charge of the hunt, but he really didn't like the idea of killing. He hardly ever hunted. He didn't like killing animals. With them also was Cliff Martinka, who was another biologist, and he was a dedicated hunter, and he was totally ready to kill these bears. He didn't want to necessarily, but he knew that he could do it if he had

to. And then they also had Curl Hagen, who was a Montana local, and a parent, could out hike and out shoot anyone in the park. Oh, Curl. So. It's a lot of good names going on. Yeah. I get name envy really bad since my name's Mike Smith, but I think I can speak for all of us when I say this is a good group of names going on.

This really is. We got Francis Elmore, Robert Wassum, Cliff Martinka, and Curl Hagen. Mike, if your name was Curl Hagen, you think you'd like the outdoors more? Oh, yeah. Or, Bert. I'd never have shaved even once. Would you be chunking in? Junkin and plugging bears out there.

Chunken and popping. So they get to the chalet, they eat lunch, and they ask Tom Walton about the bears. And Tom tells them that two bears had been visiting the chalet and eating the trash. It was that big silver tip and the smaller brownish grizzly. So the men tell Tom that all of the bears are going to have to be killed. They had been given orders to kill any bear they saw. And Elmore starts to take pictures and investigate the scene, and the hunters set up in positions where they thought they'd be most likely to get a good shot

at the bears when they came for their nightly feeding. So that evening, they put a big glob of bread dough and a bunch of bacon in the middle of the goalie where the bears typically fed and they just post up and start waiting. So Tom and his boss Ross, the second time I've written Boss Ross in my notes, without realizing how silly that is, they're standing above the hunters on the balcony and they have these big spotlights that they're ready to turn on as soon as they think there's a bear like on the food. So they have orders again to kill any grizzly bear they see. So around 9 p.m., someone reports that the smaller brownish grizzly

had been seen down by the draw leading to the campground and was likely headed toward the dump and the bait. So the rangers take position, they get their safeties off their rifles, and they're waiting. And the bear doesn't show up and they nervously asked Tom where it was, and Tom confidently says, just wait, the bears will be there. So not long after, just as it's starting to get dark, the men watches a large shadow

lumberes out of the woods and toward the bait. Tom and Ross both turn their spotlights on toward the bear, and they're surprised to see it's actually the large silver tip, not the smaller brown bear that have been seen earlier. The Rangers point their high-powered rifles at the bear, and Robert Wassam, who's the lead biologist and kind of in charge of this whole operation,

whispers a three-count and the men open fire. And immediately this large bear drops to the ground, killed instantly. About 15 minutes later, the second bear, this smaller brownish bear appears. And when the lights turn on... Sorry, 15 minutes. I was not saying like, that's a stupid bear.

They're like to keep going. No, even 15 minutes, it's kind of crazy that it showed up. But it shows up and the lights turn on just as it starts eating. And these bears are used to being in spotlights because they would put the spotlights on them almost every night as they were eating trash. And so it doesn't really react to the spotlight turning on it. And then Wassum again, counts to three, and this time they again send a barrage of bullets toward the bear,

and again, they kill it instantly. If I was Wosom, I would at least let him eat like a piece of bacon before I shot him. A little bit of bacon and dough. Yeah. That's true. That's a good point. Thanks. Both of these bears are now dead.

That's why I'm here. Yep. Thank you. And they're lying next to each other. So Wossom then asked Walton, Tom Walton, if that was it. And Tom replies that it is. So he rushes over to the dead bears, and they find out that both of them, actually were female.

Oh, wow. The larger bear weighs about 350 pounds, and the smaller bear about 250 pounds. So that's not huge, but for a female, that's not small. And they were both in decent shape for grizzly bears. Neither bear had any outward signs of having killed a human, so they didn't see any blood in their claws or their teeth. And when they cut them open, neither had any human remains in their stomachs. Nonetheless, they call headquarters and they report that the killer bear had been killed.

but had it. That's the question. Had it actually been killed? So I want to just take a quick aside here and say when Julie Helgeson was killed at the chalet, she wasn't really consumed. She was pretty torn up, but there wasn't like a lot of flesh missing from her. The bear had done some eating, but not a ton. So in theory, anything that this bear ate of her could have passed through its system by now. It's not impossible. it's very, I think it's even likely that if they found a bear, there wouldn't be any outward signs that it had been the offending bear. I just want to make a note of that because we're going to talk more about that later, about which bear is actually responsible. Yeah, okay. Okay. So back at Trout Lake, Bert Gildart shows up to his ranger headquarters

on the morning of August 14th, and he greets his friend Leonard Landa. This time, Gildart has his 30-0-6 rifle and a 357 magnum revolver with them. These two rangers had been aside to head up to Trout Lake and to kill every single grizzly bear that they encounter. And they get into a pickup truck that's loaded with camping gear and they also have a bunch of canned salmon and they head up toward the Trout Lake trailhead. So they take their time hiking to Trout Lake. They're searching for grizzly bears and grizzly bears sign the whole way, but they find no sign whatsoever until they get to the lake and they find a large scat like right by the campsite. And for those of you who don't know, with bears, we often say scat for poop. Like, this is bear shit that they found.

They quickly poke holes in this canned salmon and they spread the juice and the actual fish all over the campsite near the log jam. And then they just hunker down and they're waiting. And they're hoping this bear's going to show up just like it had done so many times throughout the summer. And when it doesn't show up by late evening, they decide maybe this bear's gone up the trail toward Arrow Lake. They don't really want to sleep by all this canned salmon that they spread everywhere.

So they decide they'll go up in that direction and spend the night in the Arrow Lake cabin. So they're walking toward the cabin. And as they're walking up there, it's getting really dark. And suddenly they're in pitch dark. And they realize that the hunter has become the hunted at this point. They are potential prey for this bear now. It's scary to be in grizzly country when it's dark. It is.

And also, it's a ton scarier when you're investigating a place where a grizzly bear just killed a person. Yeah, like a hundred times scarier. And as they're going up this little trail to Arrow Lake cabin, they're encountering a ton of bear scat and sign. So they're freaking out, and they actually start jogging to get to the cabin, and every little noise they hear in the bush, they think is a bear. They're shooting.

By the time, yeah, they're not. But by the time they get to the cabin, like their hearts are pounding, and they're almost in a full-blown panic. Yeah. But they do make it to the cabin, and they kind of curse themselves for being so dumb. back at Granite Park Chalet

that same morning Park biologist Cliff Martinka is studying the bodies of the two bears when he glances over to the bait site and he looks and sees that the bait is completely gone so the two dead bears had hardly touched this bait before they were killed and there was way too much bait for it to be

like ground squirrels and birds that picked it apart so Martinka searches out from Tom Walton and he asks him again if he's sure there's no other bears yeah And Tom says that he's sure, but that they had seen tracks from a female with Cubs back when there's snow on the ground, but that they hadn't seen any tracks from the family in over a month. And I really hoped, I was hoping that this biologist would be like, is it because the snow melted and you didn't see tracks anymore?

But no one made that point in the book. Anyway, while this was happening, Dave Shea, who was the other ranger who had been at the chalet and seen this female. bear, he had been ordered to actually go up there and help Robert Wassum, who's the main biologist with the bear hunt. And he had left an elk study that he was helping with to come and join the group. And he's hiking up there and he shows up to the chalet with rifle in hand, and he sees the two dead bears, and he turns to Wassum, and he says, where are the other ones? And Wassum says, what other ones? And Shay says, there's a sow with two cubs that comes late at night. Bert Gildart and I saw them last week. So the men look at each other and they immediately know that their job isn't over and they

get to this process of setting up their hunting positions again and this time Shea is an additional shooter. So they know that these bears show up late at night. So they're almost surprised to hear woofing and snorting coming from the draw around like 9 p.m. And they can even hear the sound of cubs bawling and crying. The bears are there but they're really nervous and I think they're potentially smelling these other bears that are still just laying out in the field. So they don't want to approach. Worried of like a threat of a different bear. Right, because a female with cubs,

this is a little bit of bear biology for you, and it's very obvious. They don't want to go in on a food source where they think there might be a male or another bear present. It's not that obvious to like most people. Because like I learned doing like the black bear study that male bears kill cubs just to like kind of get rid of future threats.

Yeah. So, like, yeah, you could see a female with cubs smelling a bear being super cautious, knowing that. Yeah. So they're famous for being the, like, the worst bear to run into on the trail, which is true. But they're also the bear that's being the most cautious. Daddy-daughter date episode. Yeah, exactly. They're also being very cautious and the episode about John Petrani, the guy that was killed on this exact same trail in 92.

But they're being cautious. they don't want any trouble because it might spell danger for their cubs. So this bear's really being cautious about approaching this site. And to these men, they're realizing, okay, this bear's acting much wilder than the other bears, these other two really food-conditioned grizzlies. So the bear noises get louder. They hear this female approaching, and then twice they're scared away by sounds or lights that come on at the chalet.

So people are kind of making mistakes and scaring these bears off. And it wasn't actually until 1 a.m. that finally the shadow of this female bear cautiously emerged from the woods, and all the men train their rifles on the bait, and they wait. And not long after, they hear the sound of the bear's lips smacking, and it's woofing as it eats the dough and bacon, and Tom and Ross both turn on the lights.

And the men opened fire on this medium-sized grizzly in the spotlight. And as the bullets struck the target, the bear actually whips around and balls at her cubs who are hiding in the darkness. Oh, man. And then another round of bullets hitter, she dies and lies still on the ground. It's sad. And at this point, it is sad.

It's really sad. It had been 48 hours and five minutes since Julie Helgeson had been attacked. It's now completely quiet outside, aside from the sound of these cubs crying as they ran for cover. The men run across the goalie and Martinka inspects the dead bear, and he finds blood on its claws and in between its toes on one of its foot pads. And then he also notices that one of its rear foot pads is injured and it's like halfway hanging off the bear's foot. and that could be a really painful injury,

and it could be something that would cause a bear to look for potentially other sources of food that are a little bit easier to get. Especially if it has cubs to take care of. Yeah, so between the blood, the foot injury, and the thought that females with cubs were the most aggressive, it leads them to agree that they had killed the right bear, and they all agree that the bear responsible

for the death of Julie Helgerson was dead. I'm going to get into this a little bit later. I don't agree. So back at Trout Lake, Bert Gildarts up at 6 a.m. And in this still kind of half-dark morning, he creeps toward Camus Creek by Arrow Lake Cabin. I'm guessing he's getting some water or taking a piss or something. It had been a really long night, and this killer grizzly was still very much in his thoughts. And so he almost thought he was still having nightmares when he turns and looks up the trail,

and a large, skinny grizzly with a huge head steps out of the brush and heads towards it. Not big head. So the cabin door was like 10 feet away. So he starts racing through all these options of what he could do. But then he realizes that he's frozen in place thinking about all his options and the bear's coming toward him. So he yells at Landa and he says that the bear's coming and to bring the rifles. So at the sound of the yelling ranger, the bear stops moving for a second and then it sidesteps into the brush of Camus Creek and it completely disappears from view. Landa shows up and he hands Gildart his 30-0-6 and he cocks his.

own rifle, a 300 Winchester, and he says, you're not kidding, are you? And Guildart says that he wasn't and that the bear was still really close. So they're looking through this kind of grainy morning half light. They're scanning the area for the bear. They can't see or hear anything. But Gildart knows that the bear didn't run away. It just kind of sidestepped into the brush. And a few minutes later, the bear reappears, and it's right by the cabin. And the two men are watching it, and it's cautiously sniffing the air and testing the air. And then it tenses up. And and it looks towards them and looks like it's about to mount a charge at them. So in unison, they raise their rifles and they look into their scopes.

And they describe it saying that when they looked into their scopes, all they could see was fur. That's how close is. It was only 20 feet away. So they fire at the same time, and one hits it right in the head and the other right in the chest. So really exactly where you'd want to hit it with both shots. The huge head. And then they forgot about the other bear who gets him from the side, right? from the side and they go, clever girl, and then it rips them apart.

No. The bear flips over backwards and it unfortunately also dies. It's lying dead in the bushes around Camus Creek. So I say unfortunately, these bears did have to be taken out of that population at this point because they'd gotten and they'd killed people. But the unfortunate part is that this didn't have to happen. Like if they had not been fed, they would not have done this. I can't say that for sure, but probably not.

This bear, it was like going to people's cabins. It wasn't like being fed really, right? They weren't. Well, it kind of was because they weren't properly securing their trash. So the bears getting into all their trash. And then at the campsites, people were just leaving food everywhere. Like when they would pack out, when they would leave the campsite, they would just leave food all over the place. There's photos from this time of the Trout Lake campsite and there's just trash everywhere.

So it's not being like fed as an attraction, but it's being. being fed and that people are just leaving food everywhere. The other one seems like totally human fault that like they were just actively feeding the bears a ton of food. The other one's a lot more conscious, but these are both definitely human caused. Okay. Without a doubt. People knew back then that feeding bears was dangerous.

They knew that much about them. Is this how you would deal with a similar situation today? Like say up in Yellowstone, there was a fatal attack. Would it just be kind of like a hunting situation? season is on, you deploy all forces and you're just shooting every bear you see or what? So I was going to get to that later, but we might as well jump into it real quick right now. It really depends on what the motivation of the bear was. So if this is, if it was a bear that attacked and fed on someone, almost certainly we would

catch that bear. And then if it was proved through DNA that that was the bear responsible for the killing, that bear would be euthanized. if it was like someone walking on a trail alone without bear spray and like if they had been warned about bears or something and a bear they surprise a bear with cubs and the bear kills them there's a good chance we wouldn't do anything aside from close that trail because that's just a bear acting naturally and responding to someone who's making a big mistake

so it really depends on the circumstances behind the attack okay that makes sense But back then, they didn't really have a great way to figure out which bear was responsible aside from cutting them open. And they also, this was unprecedented. So they just decided, let's kill them all. Let's kill every bear we see in these areas to really cover our bases. Do you agree that that was probably the right choice? I do. Because all in all, they end up killing four bears and then maybe one other one that we're going to talk about.

And all four of those bears were food conditioned. all four of them could have, the Trout Lake one for sure was responsible at the Granite Park Shelle, who knows, but all of them probably would have gotten into a lot more trouble and were liabilities. So they probably made the right decision. I hate to say that because I hate the idea of killing bears, but it was a monster that they created, unfortunately. You've got a good heart, Wes. Thanks, Mike. Crack a Cayman Jack Margarito with real lime. blue agave nectar

and real margarita taste taste your escape Cayman Jack, America's number one margarita Cayman Jack is a premium mall beverage with flavors please drink responsibly Cayman Jack beverage company Chicago Illinois So they run over to inspect this animal They see that it's a scrawny female bear

With worn down molars They're not really wanting to cut it open So they radio their superiors and they tell them that they'd killed the bear that they thought was most likely responsible for the death of Michelle Coons. And then they continue the hunt, but they find no more bears, but lots of signs.

So all four bears that have been killed are females? Uh-huh. Which is interesting, but yeah, all four have been females. So, back at the chalet. The Rangers and biologists at the chalet, they spend the rest of the night waiting to see if any other bears would show up, but no other bears do. In the morning, they go to inspect the area

where the female with cubs had been killed to see if the cubs were around. And this lead biologist Robert Wassum knew the eight-month-old cubs probably knew at that point how to find food and that they had a chance to survive on their own. And I do tend to agree with that.

It's not very likely, but there is a chance. I think you can leave those bears out there and just hope that they make it. Okay. And he was really happy that none of the men... They're not worried about them being food conditioned? Not really. They're young enough that I think they could break that habit.

But he is really happy that none of the men in front of them might make them not like people as much now. It might be like, I don't really like humans. You know, this isn't that great. Anyway, he's glad that none of the men had shot toward where they heard the cubs the night before. And as he's scanning the area, suddenly Dave Shea yells out that he's seen the cubs. So the two cubs were crying out for their mom. And they're nearby are these cubs, probably. At eight to nine months, they're pretty big.

They're probably 40 to 50 pounds, would be my guess. Okay. They're getting decent sized. Yeah. So Dave Shea yells out that he spots him, and the two cubs are crying out for their mom, and both Wassam and Shay start running toward the cub. So I don't know totally why they're doing this. Maybe they were hoping to catch them and give them to a zoo or something.

I'm not totally sure why they ran. but as they ran toward the Cubs, they actually hear shots ring out and they turn to see Martinka who's standing on a small ridge with his rifle raised to his shoulder. He continues to shoot, and remember, Martinka's kind of the hunter that is just ready

to kill all the bears he sees. And he continues to shoot at the Cubs and they run into the woods and the shooting stops. Shea and Wassum run to the spot where they'd seen the Cubs and they find blood on the rocks. So Martinka had definitely hit at least one of the Cubs. And in the documentary, I don't know who it was.

I'm not sure if it was Shay or Wassam, but they talk about that decision, and he says that he was ready to, like, throw down. He was ready to beat the shit out of Martinka. Really? Yeah, yeah. It seems like something they should have talked about before. But he was like, I wasn't happy that people were shooting at the Cubs.

Yeah. I want to fight Martinka, too. How old do you think Martinka is it? I mean, we could probably beat him up. He's like 98. I don't want to point any fingers. Yeah. We could take them.

I don't want to point fingers because, again, their mandate was to kill any bears they saw. I would never shoot at a cub. I don't agree with it, but I'm not going to pass any big judgments on this in 1967. But he shouldn't have shot those cubs. All right. So they go back to the chalet and they're told by headquarters that a reporter is planning on arriving the next morning and that they should remove all traces of the dead bears before he got there. And the book goes into this whole kind of side tangent about this reporter.

I'm not going to bring him up. He sounds kind of controversial to me, so I don't really want to get into it. But he was really adamant about getting up there. So they don't have much time. They're pretty dejected at this point because they just saw one of these cubs get shot. So they go to work on these carcasses, and they're thinking about this cub that might be nearby in the woods. Not long after a helicopter arrives and they have a barrel of lie that they're going to use to dissolve the bodies of the. the bears. I think it's dry lie that you can just sprinkle on the bear carcasses.

Not like a Breaking Bad where they put it in the tub or whatever. So they're going to use this lie on bears one and two. And then the third bear, the female that had cubs, they load it into the helicopter so that it could be examined more closely because they're convinced this is the bear that's responsible for Julie's death. They found blood on it. And then the injury and I'll talk about it more later. But Shea and Wassum, they stay at the chalet and elmore hagen and martinka get into the helicopter and then all of the men aside from martinco were dropped off at headquarters martinca was taken to arrow lake where he was told to find landa and gildart and he's advised that they'd killed another bear that was likely responsible for the death of michel coons so he gets to the site where the trout lake bear had been killed and he immediately cuts off the head of the bear and the paws for evidence

because that's what they're going to look at to see if there's any evidence of blood or anything And he notices as he does this that there's glass embedded in the gums and the molar of one of the bear. Oh, the jar. Yeah, exactly. Someone had asked, like, where does the jar come into play? And this is where that jar maybe comes into play. That glass could very potentially be from the jar of jelly. I don't remember the jar.

One of the Girl Scouts had a jar of jelly that the bear ate completely whole. And it was glass jar. And so that could have been glass from that jar. But it also was likely very painful for this bear. And again, animals that do have injuries like that, they can be debilitating and they can cause them to look for non-conventional sources of food. So he then cuts into the bear's stomach and he sits back as all this undigested food and stuff oozes out. And in the middle of all that undigested food is a large ball of human hair, blonde human hair. So this one's pretty cut and dry.

This is the bear that killed Michelle Coons. On Wednesday morning, Dave Shea and Robert Wassam were finally given permission to leave the chalet, no other bears have been spotted, and they make their way down the trail to the going to the sun road. As they make their way down the trail, they spot the two cubs running alongside a stream far down the slope. One of the cubs repeatedly was sticking its head in the stream

and then shaking it violently, and Shea pulls up his binoculars to get a better look, and he can see clearly that the small cub was missing part of the lower part of its jaw that had been shot. off. So they're pretty bummed about this, and they hike the rest of the way, hardly even talking to each other because it's a death sentence for this bear. Yeah, when are you going to tell us like a happy story, Wes? I know. I'm really sorry. It's such a bummer of a story. I promise there's a silver lining

to the story, and we're going to get to it real soon. Okay. So weeks later, at the end of this summer season in Glacier National Park, a season that completely changed the history of the park, everyone's still reeling from these deaths. Both staff and visitors at the Granite Park Chalet that night are constantly thinking about whether or not Julie would still be alive if they had just gone and looked for immediately. And then Tom, Walton, the guy who was pretty adamant about them not going and looking for her.

He was quoted in the book, and I'm going to read what he said. He said, and I quote, I often say to myself that we should have gone down and got the girl right away. I wish. I wish I would have. and I say to myself that I would go straight after her if I had to do it over again. We had no arms, nothing, not even a pocket knife. But you still have to wonder if she hadn't been out there for two hours in the cold bleeding to death.

So Tom doesn't feel great about his decision to not go look for Julie. And I give him credit for realizing that. Joan Devereaux, who was the ranger naturalist, and she'd kind of taken control and made that decision that they weren't going to go look for. she really stuck by her decision. And she later said, I don't know what the situation was, and there was no sense risking anyone else's life and going out there. And she was actually given a National Park Service medal

and an award for $250 for her actions that night. So I did want to talk about this really briefly. I feel like, I don't know. I agree with you. Like she would have got a medal if she would have looked for her too, you know? Probably. Probably a better medal. Credit to her, like, someone needed to be the,

authority in this situation. And she really stepped up and she did it. And there is the potential that she saved someone else's life by not sending people after this bear. But the question, I want to talk about this really quickly, should they have gone and looked for Julie? Yeah, they should have. I think we know that now. We have that information now. We know that Grizzlies don't like groups of people. And likely they would have been able to recover her a lot earlier. Who knows if it would have saved her life, but there's a chance it would have because she bled to death. Yeah, from some of your quotes, it just sounded like the mindset back then is like, if a grizzly decides to like kill people, it like is John Wick and will just kill an entire group of people all at once, you know? Yeah, exactly.

We've put some fun at Tom's expense a little bit at this Martinique, what's his name? Martinka. Martinka, but it's hard to know how any of us would react in that situation at that time. They all sound like they're pretty young and inexperienced. It's just, I don't know. I just want to make it known that we're not really condemning any of these people. Yeah, they did the best they could under the circumstances. We want people to know what to do, though.

Exactly. Right. We're coming at it now with 50 extra years of bear science and a lot more knowledge about what to do. And something I thought about a lot, again, is that Julie Helgeson really wasn't fed on to a large degree. She bled out from her wound. She was really ripped up, but she wasn't necessarily like missing huge sections of her body. And that makes me think that it's really likely that when that search party first went down to get Roy Ducott, the boy, that they probably scared the bear off, that that bear was probably feeding on Julie nearby. And when they went down there with like,

the tub that had fire in it and they're making all this noise searching for everyone, that all that commotion probably pushed the bear off of Julie. Like a lot of times once a bear knows that it's incapacitated its prey, it'll just slowly pick at it and kind of eat it slowly. And I'm not convinced, and I'm not saying this definitively, but I don't think it's unlikely that when they went down to help Roy Duccott, that that's what scared the bear away from Julie. Otherwise, I think when they finally got to Julie, like, hours later, she would have been a lot more eaten up than she was.

Yeah. And that's not for sure. And it could have just, like, attacked her and left. Like, it just was surprised by her and had cuts or something. See, and I don't think so. They didn't, like, move and scare these bears. I think it was a predatory attack. And I'm going to get into those motivations behind the attack in a little bit.

But it wasn't a surprise encounter. Okay. I'm almost positive about that. So. Maybe it's just an act. accident. The bear just walked across her and had its mouth open. We're going to talk about that, actually.

That's not what happened. Okay. So another person that expressed some regret was Tiet Hammond. So you remember Tete was the old guy that lived in Kelly's camp that he often had a chance to kill these bears. And what he said, I'm going to read from the book again, he said, talking about Michelle Coons, he said she was a cute-looking little blonde girl. And the thing you remember about her, he knew her from the lodge.

He said, the thing you remember about her is she was so pleasant and so nice to old folks like me. She died a horrible death up there, and I could have killed that bear a thousand times. I could have killed him a thousand times. And he kind of blamed himself for not handling this bear earlier. Well, he had his gun on it once. Yeah, but he wasn't park service, and it definitely wasn't his responsibility. He would have probably gotten a little trouble had he shot it. Maybe.

Back then, I don't think it would have been too intense, but maybe. So for a long time, the park really kept a lot of this information regarding the attacks pretty secret. And the brains of all four bears were sent to the FBI. Or no, sorry, they were sent to some cattleman group. And they examined them and found that none of them have grabies. And then the blood found on the claws was sent to the FBI. And they found it to be non-human in origin. So this wasn't human blood on the bear's claws.

And no other evidence was found that clearly showed that that female bear with Cubs was the actual. killer of Julie Helgeson. So they think that they killed the right bear. I'm not totally convinced. And the reason why I say that is, again, this bear was really cautious. It was doing its best to avoid people, to avoid any kind of confrontation. And the other thing that makes me think that maybe this wasn't the bear is that there was quite a bit of commotion when it was attacking Roy and then Julie.

and I think had that been happening, someone would have either heard or seen the Cubs. These Cubs are really vocal. Like multiple times they talk about how the Cubs were constantly crying and bawling and stuff. And I think if their mom was attacking something or ripping up a person, someone would have heard him

and someone would have said something about them. That's a good point. And I'm not saying that again definitively, but I think there's more that points to one of these other bears as being the culprit. Maybe it's still at there. That's the one in our other glacier stories is still getting them. It's not still out there.

But good, yeah, it's a good, a good thought, I guess. Anyway, I'm not saying that it's not the bear, but I'm not convinced. The other bear, 100% was the bear that killed Michelle Coons. Yeah, the Trout Lake Bear, they got the right one. Yep. So much later, the park actually releases a statement. And in this statement, they give, they just put a ton of content in there, and they give a ton of different potential reasons for this almost unbelievable.

coincidence that two women were killed in the same night by two different grizzly bears. Yeah, I've been wanting to bring up, though, that, like, it sucks so much that it happened the same night. Yeah. Because it's like, had just one attack happened before, then the other one probably would have been prevented. Because it's like, they knew that there were, like, they would have just been way more cautious or, like, they would have, like, cared way more about, like, a bear terrorizing campsites

had someone died already, you know? Yep, because these deaths absolutely changed the way that the park did business. But at the same time, on that same argument, I think the fact that this was so shocking that two people died in one night made the changes that much more extreme and that much quicker. Yeah, it's not like that was just a weird bear. It's like two bears. It was two bears.

It got all sorts of national attention and like Walter Cronkite reported on it. All sorts of big things happened. So they released this big statement and in the statement they have all these different reasons for why this could have happened and they talk about lightning strikes and And the cosmetics that the women are wearing and the atmospheric pressure and the availability of natural food and bear psychology and they even talk about the fact that these women might have been menstruating Yeah, it was gonna ask And the fact that like these two bears are undoubtedly food conditioned was buried in all these other potential reasons and that's for sure of the reason that these bears decided to kill these people. Almost for sure.

I shouldn't say for sure because you just can't say that. They could have been menstruated. But I want to really quickly talk about that one. Women out there are people who menstruate, don't worry about that. If you're a person who menstruates, that's been proven that it's not a bear attractant. So you can go enjoy the great outdoors when you're on your period. You should still be careful about how you dispose of, of, like, sanitary products, but you don't need to worry about it.

It's not something that's going to cause you to be attacked by a bear. 100%. Don't worry about it. I learned about that from Parks and Rec that, like, that was everything. Yeah. Just like a joke on that. You'd be shocked how often I get asked that question. I would.

My advisor, my mentor, Tom Smith, he actually did a study where he put used tampons out on a stick in a place where there was tons of grizzly bears. And then he also put unused tampons out there. And they were actually more interested in the unused ones than they were the used ones. And it's not like they were more interested in any of them than anything else. They're just interested in everything they come across. So don't worry about it. Just be careful about how you store and dispose of things. Okay. So this debate starts raging all over the country about how this could have happened, why it happened. A lot of people point out that Glacier National Park had been feeding bears at the chalet for decades,

and they say that there had been over a dozen bears at a time at these feedings, and no one had ever been hurt. But the thing is, back then, not that many people were visiting in the park, and even fewer were staying in the chalet, and the people that were staying at the chalet were sleeping inside. Only recently had people begun to camp outside near the chalet, and in this new campground. And so this bear feeding in 1967 represented one of the first times

that sleeping people were directly in the path of the... the approaching bears. So it's a really bad situation that was pretty new and novel for the park. Trout Lake was also seeing a lot more visitors that summer than normal. People were consistently leaving trash and food waste at the campsites almost nightly. There's photos of Trout Lake online, and there's just trash everywhere back then. And the book also mentions that it had been a really dry summer, and that had caused berry production to be really low. So the bears might have been looking for other sources of food. But I kind of think that's a non-star. because this bear had obviously already been looking for human food as far back as June and before that.

So that was before any of the berries are even out. I mean, this bear already had a habit. And I don't think it really mattered too much that there weren't that many berries that year for the trout lake bear at least. Yeah. It was simply a bear that had gotten into human food. It had gotten a reward. It wasn't afraid of people really that much anymore. Right.

That, like, that human food reward was so tempting that it put aside this food. of humans. So here's kind of my, I don't know, I would say this is my hypothesis of what happened with these bears. So bears are opportunistic. They are constantly on the look for food. They eat a variety of different things. And both of these bears were food conditioned. And what that means, the important part of that is that they are starting to take risks that put them closer to human beings. So they're more comfortable around human beings than the typical bear will be because they're searching for food. So that's what puts them in close quarters with humans to begin with. And I think with both bears, they probably were investigating those areas just looking for food. And they suddenly

stumbled upon a person. And when a bear is walking through the woods and it stumbles on a deer fawn or an elk calf or something that it sees on the ground that it knows is potential food, they kill it. And That's what they do. It triggers a predatory instinct in them and they kill it. And I think that's what happened. I think these bears weren't necessarily predatory and that they were like searching for someone to eat, but they were opportunistic. And they were there because they were food conditioned. They were that close to people because they had kind of lost this natural fear of humans. And then when they stumbled across someone in a sleeping bag, especially like a smaller girl that is not a threat, that predatory. Instinct kicks in and they kill it. And that's what I think happened. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. You stick to your guns, Wes. Yeah, I think that's the most logical explanation.

And the crazy thing is that it happened twice in one night. I think that was just a combination of factors leading up to a really wild coincidence. Okay. So I think that's the important thing to remember about food conditioning, though, is that it's so dangerous because it not necessarily that it makes bears think that people are food, but that it causes bears to become more comfortable taking risks and more comfortable getting close to humans. And when they get that close to humans, they might act aggressively or those predatory instincts might just kick in. So a couple other little things.

A bear that's hanging around people is going to be more dangerous than a bear that never sees people. Exactly. And that's afraid of people. Okay. So that fall, there's a guy hunting on the North Fork the Flat Hood River just outside the park boundaries when he's surprised by a large male grizzly bear. This is a 47-year-old hunter from California, and that bear mauls the shit out of him. His friends come in there and they shoot the bear before it can kill him, but he gets pretty badly mauled by this bear. Then in the spring of 1968, the following spring, a school teacher named Robert Hahn was solo hiking near Saya Creek in Glacier National Park when he spots a female grizzly and

her cubs a few hundred yards away. He's an amateur photographer. He starts taking pictures of these animals, but he gets so engrossed that he doesn't notice that the bears are actually getting really close to him. And when he finally looks up from his camera, the bear's only 65 feet away. And he decides, yeah, it might be. He finally, at that point, he decides that he's going to stand up and let the bear know that he's there. But he makes a mistake because that bear's already crossed this threshold of where it decides rather than run away, he's too close, exactly, and it's going to charge him. So it charges him. It ditches its cubs. It runs after him. He tries to climb a tree a few feet away, and the bear bites into him as he's climbing the tree, rips him out of the tree, and they're on a

steep hill covered in snow, and they both go tumbling down this hill for 200 feet. Oh, man. And as they're tumbling down this snow hill, he grabs another tree. 200 feet? Yeah. And he grabs this other tree, and he climbs. 20 feet up and this bear follows him 20 feet up into this tree, bites him a couple more times, and then finally backs down the tree and runs off into the woods and joins her cup. So he ends up in the hospital. He's pretty ripped up. And while he's recovering in the hospital, he says, okay, this was totally my fault. This bear was just doing what they do naturally. She's protecting her cubs. And they end up just closing the trail and don't have any other incidents with this bear.

So that's, again, something we would probably do nowadays is that's like a dude that got way too close to a bear was hiking by himself, taking some big chances. You're not going to punish that bear for just defending her cubs. So this night of August 12th and then these other recent mallings that we just went over really shake the park. And they completely change the way that the park manages their bears. So I'm going to read one last section here from the book. Oh, I'm saying that again, but there is one more tiny one later. But in the book, they go over some of these changes. And this might be a tiny bit dry, but I do think it's really important.

So everyone out there pay attention because this is kind of the silver lining to this story. So when Glacier Park opened for the summer season of 1968, Rangers and staff biologists laid down the most rigorous system of bear control in National Park Service history. Grizzlies were placed on the strictest probation. If a bear bothered human beings more than once, it was to be shot. Sorry, this isn't necessary. the silver lining yet, but we'll get to it.

If a grizzly was trapped, ear-tagged, and removed to another area, and then returned on its own to the point of its first capture, it was shot. Rangers had the authority to kill instantly any bear, black or grizzly that showed aggressive tendencies. Dozens of other steps were taken. Trails were closed at the first sign of a grizzly. Campsites were shut down and reopened, only when foraging grizzlies had moved away. This is the good stuff. Warning signs were posted everywhere.

And information about bears was placed at every trailhead. A strict pack-in, pack-out policy was initiated. Hikers had to haul out their empty cans and other trash, and one ranger was placed on permanent horseback patrol throughout the park to see that the rule was obeyed. That still happens, by the way. There's lots of backcountry rangers that are just out there to bus people for breaking those rules. All unnatural sources of food, such as the dumps at Pohlbridge and Granite Park, were removed,

and the park's service long-standing rule against feeding bears were strictly enforced for the first time in anyone's memory. Ironically, the stern program of 1968 seemed to have a more telling effect on the park's relatively harmless black bears. Twenty black bears were put to death, or about three times the summertime average. But the grizzlies seemed a sense that a crackdown was on, and relatively few sightings were made. One of the only executions was the cub that had been wounded the year before at Granite Park. Early in 1968, the younger bear was seen near many glacier, but it was in poor physical condition and unable to feed properly with its shattered, A ranger put the pathetic creature out of its misery.

Okay, that's pretty sad. I'm not, I mean, there's a chance that that bear made it through the winter. There's a chance it would have survived, but they did what they did, and maybe it would have died a slow death. Yeah. So a lot of changes were made over the next few decades, and those management decisions really helped fix a lot of the problems that were there in the past. And it really gave Grizzlies a much better shot at proliferating and rebounding.

We kind of talked about some of the rules that we do in Yellowstone, but we do a lot of stuff. We haze bears that are close to getting into trouble, and that gives them a negative association of people. That's anything from like yelling at them to shooting beanbags at them. We close and we mark trails and campsites that could potentially have bears on them that might be getting into trouble. There's really strict punishments for people who break rules. We relocate problem bears. There's like, there's a lot of stuff now that we do to avoid these kinds of things. of problems in the future. And a really important thing that's been done is now there's bearproof

boxes at all of these campsites in human use areas, and there's really strict rules for backcountry campers. And all of that stuff has really reduced the potential for bear attacks. But I do think it's really important to note that park visitation is going way up, and there still are tons of people going out into the back country and the front country and everything, and bear populations have gone way up. So there's bound to be some run-ins between the two. And since the night of the grizzlies, there have been eight more fatalities in Glacier National Park attributed to Glacier Bears. We've, or to grizzly bears. We've talked about one of them, which was John Petrani in 1992. That was the guy that Buck Wilde found his corpse and then it was gone. A few seconds later,

that was a really creepy one. Okay, I promise we're almost done with the story. So after all this happened, there's a lot of public outcry, and a lot of news outlets, including some in Montana, were actually calling for the complete removal of grizzly bears south of the Canadian border. And pro-Grisley activists didn't love this. There's definitely more people on the side of the bears. And what they quoted out Aldo Leopold, who's like the father of modern conservation, he wrote a really beautiful book called the Sand County Almanac. And what he said, and I totally agree with this, he said, there seems to be a tactic assumption that if Grizzlies survive in Canada, in Alaska, that is good enough. It is not good enough for me. Relegating Grizzlies to Alaska is about

like relegating happiness to heaven, and one may never get there. And I totally agree with that. Like, Grizzlies belong in the lore of 48. So this debate's raging, and when the book was published Night of the Grizzlies, the author, Jack Olson, he ends on a pretty somber note. He says that the doom of the grizzly bear is pretty much sealed. Again, it was published in 1969. And he says that the night of the grizzlies is kind of what sealed their doom. And he says that more grizzly attacks would happen, that they would continue to incite a lot of fear and public pressure, and sooner or later all the grizzlies would be hunted to extinction in the lower 48.

But the silver lining, finally were getting into the positive stuff, the opposite actually happened. So the Endangered Species Act in 1973 was a huge thing for grizzly bears. It protected them both inside and outside the park. And then also the Night of the Grizzlies really exposed that we have a deep lack of knowledge for how to properly deal with grizzly bear encounters. And it led wildlife biologists to really look deeper into grizzly bear behavior and motivations behind attacks.

And one of those biologists was Stephen Herrero, who intensely studied human bear conflict, and he published dozens of papers on the topic, and eventually wrote the book Bear Attacks, Their Causes and Avoidance, which is really considered to be the Bible of Bear Attacks Science. And Stephen Herrera was actually the mentor of Tom Smith, who's my mentor. Oh, cool. So that science continues to be passed on.

It continues to grow. We continue to learn more and more about contributing factors to bear attacks. And it's just an evolving science, and I think it's really beautiful that all this information came from this really horrific tragedy. And the best thing of all is now we have a deterrent that we can pack. literally on your side that doesn't kill bears and stops a lot of these attacks. So that's part three. And that's bear spray, just so everyone knows. That's bear spray.

Does it matter what type of bear spray you get? Like, it's all pretty certified, right? All of the brands are pretty much the same. Yeah, they have to meet certain EPA certifications. And for the Grizzly Bear Committee to approve them, they have to meet certain qualifications and all of them pretty much do. So they're pretty much all the same. As long as it says bear spray, you're good.

Yeah. But for me, it was really cool reading that thing about Stephen Herrero. Because, again, I'm a direct, like, I'm his grandson in the bear world. And it's really neat to know that my journey has been affected by Night of the Grizzlies. Yeah. And so I don't know. It was a really, like, beautiful way for me to kind of end this whole thing. Yeah, that's cool.

There's a good silver lining. Good job. It was. It was. It pulled it off. Thanks. All right. Questions about part three?

Anything? Did it affect like other national parks at all? Totally. It affected the whole park system. There's a big upheaval and everything they did with bears. Because Yellowstone already had problems too, so they were probably like, we should get a hold of this too.

They did right when this was happening. Yellowstone was in the middle of closing all of their last few dumps. Uh-huh. So Yellowstone was actually like maybe a little ahead of the curve. And Yellowstone had already had a few fatalities too. but the fact that two women died in the same night and Glacier really just shook everyone like everyone was like okay we gotta do a better job

yeah no that's good at I think it's a good way to emphasize like you just need to understand the animal in order to like be able to engage with it but like respect it you know and it should it should exist it should be part of like the environment right it belongs there and this could have gone

the other way. People could have just decided, okay, we're killing all the bears and glacier. And luckily it didn't. Luckily, we learned from it. And their deaths, although really tragic and I'm not saying it's good that they died, they weren't in vain. And when like some really good things came out of it. And bears are doing much better now. All right. Mike, you got anything you want to add? Yeah, you guys ever worry that you'll get food conditioned to bear food by eating all those huckleberries up in glacier. And that we'll start becoming way too comfortable

around bears. I haven't thought about that. I haven't. I'll stop. I need to. Maybe that's why. That's another theory for like bear attacks

that you probably haven't looked into, Wes. Is like, they're like, this human is becoming too bear conditioned. We probably should kill it. It's acting abnormal.

Abnormally. Yeah. It's a good point. We don't know. You know, we need to figure out a way to talk to them. Well, let's get into our categories. Yeah, let's do it. So we're doing, we're doing a fun one to

kind of break again, uh, what's a somewhat somber episode. We're going to talk about our cutest and scariest bears from pop culture. Ooh, we're doing scariest too. Okay. Yeah. I'll go first. Mine's Paddington for cute. And my scary one is the zombie bear from annihilation. Oh, that's a good one. That one's scary. Yeah. That's my picks. So my cute is Corderoi, the bear. Have you ever read Corderoi, the story of the little toy bear that lost his button?

Oh, yeah, I do remember that one. I do. He's pretty, he's got these little green overalls. He's pretty cute. Yeah. Scariest. Oh, man. That bear from Annihilation's a good pick.

You can pick the same as me if you want. I like the bear from Balto. That bear is massive. That's a good bear. Huge, scary bear. Yeah. Okay. So my cutest bear, I'm going to go with Mimi from Kung Fu Panda 3.

Good pick. I love Kungu Panda 3. I love Kna, hot cute, you know? Yeah. Like a good dancer, stuff like that. In my opinion, the best of the Kung Fu Panda movies. My scariest, I'll just go with Borg from Hobbit. Borg?

What is his name? Bjorn. Oh, Bjorn. Yeah. Yeah, Bjorn from the Hobbit movie. He's kind of like half bear. Yeah. trying to like knock the door down.

Okay. I wanted to do, first of all, I wanted to ask you guys, this is a kind of a category specific to this series. For you guys, what was the most, you know, I'm going to let you think about it while I read some other ones, but what was the most memorable part of the night of the Grizzlies for you? Like, what was one thing that really stood out in any way? And I want to read a couple comments that we've gotten from people. And this isn't like a congratulatory comments. It's just some things that people brought up that I thought, were really interesting.

So the first one is from Justice, who Justice did our, our tiger design. And they said, I think the scariest part of these stories for me is hearing what people say is they're getting attacked. And I can't agree more.

When I read, hearing the women say, like call out for their mommies or saying like, oh God, I'm dead, that's the stuff that really shakes me. Like, that's the hard stuff for me

that people turn into children as they're being attacked by animals, you know, and all they want is, like, their mom or, like, something to make them not feel so scared. And that's, like, that's the hardest part. So, totally agree with you justice. I don't know. I think being eaten is the hardest part for me. Yeah, it's the scariest part, though, for me reading the stories.

Fair enough. Shannon said, it's heartbreaking that she was alive during the whole attack. She was completely alert and oriented. She's talking about Julie. Despite her sucking injury. being in respiratory distress, she was even able to process what the priest was saying and mouthing along. The comforting thing is that she was surrounded by people who were caring for her, rather than being alone in the cold, being consumed alive while you're still totally lucid.

I do want to mention these are all Patreon people that made these comments. I agree with that too. I took a lot of comfort in knowing that Julie at least got to die in a warm room with someone holding her hand and telling her that everything was going to be okay that's so much better than dying out in the woods alone in the cold so there is that one thing that you can take that like at least that happened for her you guys got anything to add on that i i prefer the other one because it seemed way faster to me yeah i mean i know we don't know the bear would have stuck around but like it just seemed like she was alive when they found her who she's saying that

it's better that they found her and took her back to the chalet than her like dying alone in the woods Right, right. Julie. No, I want to hear your argument for why the other one could be better. No, I was saying that the other attack at Trout Lake. Oh, I get what you're saying. Okay. Yeah, I agree.

The other one was better for sure. I thought you're comparing them. No, no, no. She was just saying it's better than dying out in the woods. Yeah. Which I was really curious to see how you're going to be. It wouldn't have been the first time. I like solitude.

Yeah, Jeff just really digs his heels on that. Just annoyed with everyone trying to help me. as I'm dying. So Laura said, I would totally have gone looking for Julie 150%. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. Grab everything you can from the chalet, skillets, fire poker, boards, whatever you can, and go saver. So sad, I got choked up. We agree with you, Laura.

Or at least, I think we all do. Probably should look for it. Mike, would you look for? Oh, yeah, for sure. Honestly, I would. There were so many of them there. In the book wild episode, he said you wouldn't go look for him. Side.

Yeah, he was alone. By himself. Yeah, I would, I mean, as much as I'd like to think that I could play the hero, that's like actually there in like a secluded forest crime scene, basically. That'd be so hard to walk after towards a bear that just killed someone. There was 60 people in the chalet. Like, they should have woken up every single person and said, hey, we're all going. And they would have gone at least half of them to go, I think. Okay.

So Francesca said it was super. interesting following the bear in the weeks leading up to the attack in this one. I even felt lulled into a false sense of safety myself listening along thinking, nah, this bear isn't going to kill anyone. Even knowing what you've said so many times about the dangers of food conditioned bears West, that made it easier for me to see how the rangers could have been, become complacent, even though they obviously should have addressed this bear way earlier. So I thought that was an interesting input that she kind of could feel that feeling of like, oh, this is how people become complacent because it just happens.

over and over again, no one's getting hurt. So it's like, oh, this is going to be fine. This bear's not going to hurt anyone. So I thought that was interesting. Okay, one more. Lina said, I know we shouldn't try to apply human emotions to animals, but the bear being described here seems unusually aggressive, almost vengeful even. Is this level of aggression and boldness typical of bears that have been habituated the way this one had, or did the Rangers of the time just let it go on too long? So I just wanted to bring that one up really quickly because it wasn't habituation. It was food conditioning that led to this.

And yeah, the Rangers totally let it go on too long. So that was a good comment though. Okay, so those are the comments. I wanted to, before hearing your guys, just thank everyone for super nice comments on this series. We've gotten a lot of really good positive feedback. And we do really appreciate it. And if you haven't shared it with your friends already, you should.

There's a plug for sharing it with your friend. All right, Mike, what was your thing that you really took away from this one? So the one thing that stuck with me was actually the same exact thing that, whoever it was that you read the second comment that you read when she was conscious enough to recognize that she was being read her last rights. Yeah. And basically just recognize that, oh, I am dead. This is these are my final moments.

And like during that part of the story, when you were telling, it like I felt such a somber kind of heavy silence washover even just the three of us and it was I don't know that's just devastating like I can't yeah I can't imagine the sadness and the pain and yeah yeah man totally Jeff yeah I mean with justice what they were saying just like it really stuck out to me when they were carrying her back to the chalet and she said like I'm scared and held his hand. That was the saddest part to me. And then, I don't know, it does like make you kind of almost wish you were there to go look for. Like, I understand they didn't have the knowledge we have, but like I just wish that they would have found her faster. Yeah. Cool. Well, not, again, not cool.

I'm not saying cool at the wrong time. All right. Okay. So, Jeff, I think you've, We've got a few more listener questions for us. Yeah. So we'll do two Patreon ones first. Mm-hmm. So this one is almost more like a comment, but I thought it was really good. So it's from...

Oh, shoot. It's only four letters, but I'm going to mess it up. Alla. Ayla? Ayla. Alla. Okay. I landed a date on Bumble with this guy

by asking about the cake and ice cream debate. Six months later, and he's the love of my life, the best partner for all the coolest outdoor ventures. Scuba diving together is our favorite. He told me today he definitely would have ignored me if I didn't have a cool opener. So in a way, I owe it all to you guys. 100% she owes us for her dream relationship.

Yeah, without a doubt. You have to name your kids after us. You have to have three boys, and they have to be Mike. You can name a girl after me. I'm happy with that. Oh, yeah. That'd be a cute girl's name.

Since then, I've converted him to be a tooth and claw listener, and after lots of careful thought and debate, we have concluded that cake and ice cream is, in fact, one dessert, not two. And for the record, this Night of the Grizzly series is stellar. You guys are the best, hope all is well with each of you. Wes, you don't like to admit when you're wrong. Are you going to admit that you're on? I at least appreciate that they put a lot of time and thought into it and didn't come to a quick conclusion.

I'm just saying that in my hypothetical that I created, I get to make the rules. And it was two desserts. Sure. That's a beautiful story. Thanks, guys. That's maybe my favorite listener comment slash question you've done so far. That was a great one. Oh, really?

even though you're totally wrong. Yeah, it's fine that they think I'm wrong. I love that we brought two people together, you know? Yeah. Okay. So another Patreon question, Kate wants to know how we're doing with our New Year's resolutions. Not great, Kate. Oh, you're not meditating?

Nope, I'm not. I did go to the gym this week. So I just, I like talk to my friend Stevie who listens and we decided to do push every night. She was going to do 50. I was going to do 100. And I've done 100 pushups every single day so far this year. And she's only done it one day, I think. And every Sunday we tell each other like how many we did. But now I feel weird because it's like just me telling her how many pushups I'm doing every weekend. So I think I'm going to stop reporting and just keep doing it. Mike?

What was mine again? I don't know. It doesn't sound like it's doing great. Meet one person. Stop kidding myself. That's what it was. Stop kidding yourself. I stopped completely.

Yeah. Mission accomplished. Right. All right. Home Alone 2. A lot of us think Home Alone 2 is the better movie. And just the people that came out of the shadows to tell you that. Luke 6.6 wants to know, does Lightning McQueen have car insurance or life insurance?

Hmm. What do you guys think? Well, so life insurance is like. for your family more so like can cars in the world of cars have sex and have like baby cars with their mufflers or stuff? I don't know I think so they were like way into each other yeah like like the Queen was probably horny probably bulls I think like health insurance versus car insurance is the question that's probably what they meant yeah and I would say car insurance

because he's a car okay so Sophia Leah I'm gonna think about that Uh, wants to ask Mike, five things Mike hates more than he hates horses. Oh, that's so hard. Uh, people, people that pronounce the word familiar, familiar. I hate those people more than I hate horses. I know one of those people, but I love her a lot. Celery and food that doesn't need celery to have it, like chicken salad or stews. I like celery.

Get the hell out of there, dude. Get it out of there. I like it. most things. I hate the Raiders. I hate the Broncos and I hate the chiefs. There you go. Guys, you don't know what pains are a horse. I know. That's true. Freaking charges. I'm so ready to just fall asleep and never wake up. From Call Her Nettys. Which Harry Potter movie is best? Favorite Harry Potter character. I'm like just getting through the fourth one right now and Cedric Digger is my favorite character.

I'm really excited to see where he goes in the series. Yeah. Oh, buckle up, dude. My honest answer, I like the third one, prisoner of Raskaban. Yep. I think the director is a genius, that particular director. And my favorite character in the whole series is probably serious. That's my answer, exactly.

It's my favorite book and favorite movie and serious is the man. He's so dope. He just turns into that big dog. Yeah. That's cool. Alfonso Curran. That's the guy that directed that.

All right. Alex Grohgel. Are bears more like cats or dogs? My knee jerk is to say dogs. Yeah. Cats? I say dogs. Cats kind of get like surprised like bears do.

And then like... So do dogs. Yeah. Okay. They're just kind of. more opportunistic and bumbling like dogs. They like belly rubs more. Probably.

Okay. And, oh yeah. So last question. Spoiler alert on this one. If you want to watch the show Yellowstone and don't have, want to have a minor detail spoiled. So it's not big, but Mike hates whales. Okay. Taken off my earphones.

So are you finished with it, Wes? Yeah. So they, we've had two. people, so Megan, Brickwood, and someone else, they want to ask about, like, the wolf attack scene and also the bear. Okay, the wolf attack question was about the show Yellow Jackets. That's what I meant. Yeah, yellow jackets.

Okay. Right. So in the show Yellow Jackets, there's a girl that's attacked by Wolf. I have seen it. I really like the show. I think the wolf, like, tearing hatter looked realistic, but the fact that there was, like, a bunch of girls around and suddenly there's a wolf attacking one of them wasn't very realistic they they don't they don't attack people it just doesn't really happen especially in the u.s or canada or wherever

they're supposed to do it. Yeah and then there's a bear scene where the bear just kind of shows up and lays down in front of one of the girls like what's her stab it in the head with a knife yeah that's not realistic either so I don't yeah I wouldn't say either those are very realistic mm-hmm okay I like the show a lot but yeah it's a very show I was like like she's just like stabbed it and dead like once yeah yeah could you kill a grizzly with a knife like that you could but it wouldn't be that quick yeah and it probably wouldn't just lay down and let you no uh all right well that's it for listener questions thank you all right for writing in those were fun and we're going to keep answering them okay so we're going to do a quick how are we

messing things up for them, a little conservation corner. I wanted to talk really quickly about the current status of grizzly bears in Glacian National Park. And there's actually a lot of bears in that particular ecosystem. They're part of the northern continental divide ecosystem. And there's probably over a thousand bears in that ecosystem now, which is really great. They've really rebounded from a long time ago. But what I wanted to talk about was a current issue with them. So I want to talk about 300 in episode one. No, there's there's 300 within glacial National Park, but in the entire ecosystem, there's over a thousand. I got you. Okay. So there's actually been a recent series in our local paper, the Missoulean, that talks about the issues with grizzly bear population

expanding and all these conflicts that have been happening because conflicts have really ticked up. And when I say conflicts, it's more like grizzly bears raiding people's beehives or getting into their grain storage. And in the paper, a lot of the state biologists actually went on record to say that they don't support delisting the grizzly bear because there's a big push by some of the governments of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho to take grizzly bears off the endangered species list. And technically, there are enough bears to do that. But the reason that so many of these biologists oppose that delisting is because attitudes have

really changed again. And this kind of right-wing, hard-right legislation has created this anti-preditor attitude again in the Northern Rockies. And it's led to people wanting to really pass some aggressive laws for controlling grizzly bears. And those laws are like, if a grizzly bear is threatening your property or livestock, you can kill it. And threatening isn't defined. So you can define what that means. So you could say a grizzly bear that's just on your property was threatening. you and you can kill it legally. And that's just an example. A lot of those kind of laws are

being passed. The way that people are hunting other animals puts grizzly bears directly in danger, specifically the way they're hunting wolves. And it's just, it's like the pendulum is swinging too far in a certain direction. And it makes a lot of bear biologists, including myself, really nervous about the future of grizzly bears. And it feels like the attitudes are almost like the attitudes that existed in the early 1900s, that grizzly bears are a scourge and that they need to be eliminated and their population needs to be reduced. And that's really scary. And so for me, I want to echo what those biologists were saying in the park and say that I don't support them being delisted right now. I think we need to find ways to coexist with grizzly bears to carve out a space

for them on the landscape because they're important animals and they're animals that belong on the landscape and it's a really scary time for them. So that's just kind of my last two sense about that, about the grizzlies specifically in Montana. And I really hope that cooler heads will prevail and that we'll be able to come up with really good rules for managing grizzlies. And when we do, I think it's good that we delist them because that means that we are successful, that we got grizzlies to a point where we don't need them to be protected by the Endangered Species Act anymore. And that, to me, is a victory, it shouldn't be something that we're scared of. So hopefully that happens. And I sure, I sure love grizzly bears. Chain myself to one if they pass that so that they can't kill it.

Oh, that's not the best thing to chain yourself to. It works with trees. It does. I don't know how well it would work with the Grizzlies. Okay, so we didn't really, we had those extra little attacks that we tacked on. I don't think we need to do outgies for them, but let's, Again, reiterate our claw rating for grizzly bears. Ten claw animal for me, my favorite animal. Jeff? Ten. Mike, you still ten or are you a nine or are you a ten yet?

I'll give the one with the big head a ten, but the rest get a nine. Okay. Fair enough. Oh, and real quick, I want to do our, like, game and just see how many species of bear Mike can name. How many species of bear are there, Wes? There's eight species of bears. Okay. How many do you think Mike can name in 15 seconds?

I think he can name five. In 15 seconds? No, I think he can name four in 15 seconds. Okay, I'll take the over. You want to bet me $5? Say four and a half. Four and a half. Okay.

Ready, set, go. Grizzly bear, black bear, polar, panda, sun, spectacled, and one other stupid bear I can't think of. What's it called? Two other stupid bears. You didn't get sloth bear and you didn't get Asiatic black. That is the Asiatic one. I owe Jeff $5.

Yeah. Good job, Mike. Hey. Cool. Yeah, Mike's is good at that as you, I, Wes. Cool. Well, I think that's all we have for you guys, right? Yeah.

Good job, Wes. Hopefully that's all we have. Three-parter. All the episodes were long. Lots of information. Good job. I thank you. I'm really ready to be done with this one.

Thanks everyone for all the nice comments. We really put a lot of time into this, and it really was nice, especially for me to read all of your nice comments about this series in particular. It really made it worth it, and I hope you enjoyed it. And honestly, if you are enjoying the podcast, just if you want to subscribe to our Patreon, if you can afford it,

you're going to get a lot more content, and it's really fun. We have a fun little community over there. If you can't afford that, you can afford to leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. And to echo what Wes said earlier, word of mouth is great for us. Instagram sharing is great for us, you know. Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your drug dealers. Tell everyone.

Tell everyone. Tell the... Your representatives. Yeah, tell the president. That would be great if Biden started listening. He wouldn't know what they're saying. All right. Well, love you guys.

You made it. We all did it together. You stuck with us. All right. See you. Bye. See it.