The Day I Became a Bear Person

Before 9 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-September, a bull moose was ramming his antlered head into a tree off the side of the road into Grand Teton National Park. Not grazing. Not standing there looking scenic. He was going to work on the trunk, the tree shaking with each hit, the moose roughly the size of it. Brandon and I sat in the car in silence and watched, both of us grinning. It was the best possible thing to stumble into before we’d made it to our first stop.

Grand Teton was a completely different category from anything I’d hiked before. Bear country. Real wilderness. I had spent weeks reading about the trails, the wildlife, the seasons – and a meaningful amount of time reading about bears specifically. The difference between grizzlies and black bears. What to do if one charges. What to do if one doesn’t stop charging. By the end of my research, I understood bears considerably better and felt considerably more nervous about them.

The Tetons appeared beside the road, and we couldn’t stop looking. That never changed the whole trip. At Mormon Row, the old homestead barns stood against them. A hundred years of weathered wood and rusted roofs, nothing between the flat valley floor and the range rising straight up behind.

Then Schwabacher Landing: the Snake River reflecting the mountains back at itself, the air completely still. It’s a known stop for wildlife photographers chasing the perfect shot.

Jenny Lake sits at the base of the Teton Range, carved by glaciers about 12,000 years ago – the same ice that cut Cascade Canyon directly above it. The mountains were named by French-Canadian trappers: les trois tétons, meaning “the three breasts.” Someone had a sense of humor.

At the boat dock, I stopped to ask the teenager working the booth whether they’d spotted any bears recently. She checked the dry-erase board on the wall. One black bear. She also mentioned that this area doesn’t have grizzlies. I smiled and nodded. I had read enough AllTrails reviews of Cascade Canyon to have my doubts about that.

We took the shuttle boat across the lake and started hiking up toward Hidden Falls. Then everything slowed. Someone stopped and pointed upward into a tree, very high up, high enough that you had to tilt your head all the way back. There was a black bear, wedged into the branches, fast asleep, completely unfazed by the crowd gathering below. Hidden Falls came into view shortly after.

We kept climbing toward Inspiration Point. At the top, we found a good rock to sit on and rest. Jenny Lake spread out far below us, the valley stretching wide and open beyond it. We sat there for a bit before the canyon called us forward.

And then the Cascade Canyon trail opened into something else entirely: a wide canyon between two granite ridgelines, a creek running alongside the path, the mountains rising on both sides into the sky. The noise of people disappeared. What replaced it was moving water and wind and the sound of our own footsteps.

Brandon and I walked quietly. That’s the thing about places this beautiful – they don’t make you want to talk. They make you want to be still in them.

About an hour into the canyon, we noticed a small cluster of hikers stopped ahead, all facing the same direction. Someone had binoculars. Someone was quietly pointing across the creek.

She was on a massive fallen log on the far bank, maybe a hundred feet away, tucked into the tall grass and dappled canyon light, easy to miss. Then my eyes adjusted, and there was no missing her. A bear. Her cub was there too, small and dark, moving around on the log beside her.

Grizzly or black bear, we weren't sure. The teenager at the ticket booth had said no grizzlies. I looked more carefully through the binoculars, and there it was – the distinctive hump between her shoulders, the feature that separates grizzlies from black bears. I told Brandon what I was seeing. An older woman standing next to us nodded. She'd seen it too. None of us said anything for a moment.

The crowd grew to maybe twenty people, all watching in near silence. Her ears tracked the group, perked and attentive even as the rest of her stayed completely still. Alert and at rest at the same time, which somehow made her more magnificent. The cub was less composed: stretching out, climbing to different corners of the log, flopping across her at one point like a small, tired child who doesn’t care where they land. She didn’t flinch.

We stayed for thirty minutes. It felt like five. People shared binoculars with strangers. Someone whispered a fact.

Here is what I want to tell you: I went into this trip nervous about bears. What I felt watching her was nothing like nervousness. It was something closer to awe.

She was still on the log when we came back down on the return. We stopped again. Of course we did.

A little further up the trail, a group of hikers came toward us, moving faster than people usually hike. They were trying to tell us something, voices overlapping, eyes wide, but the words didn't land clearly.

The fourth bear was sitting upright on a boulder at the side of the trail, the way a person would. Front paws loose. Just posted up, watching the trail with complete indifference.

I stopped walking. Brandon did not. He kept walking, which was when the bear climbed down from the rock. The moment I saw it move, my body made a decision before my brain finished processing – I started walking back toward the group of hikers behind us, arms signaling: bear, coming this way, everyone back up.

Meanwhile Brandon, having walked around the rock to get a better look at where the bear went, came face to face with it on the trail. The bear looked at him. Brandon looked at the bear. Then it turned, crashed through the brush, and was gone. All that adrenaline, and then nothing but branches settling back into place.

We stood there and looked at each other. Then we laughed, relief leaving our bodies all at once. For the rest of the hike, we thought every dark stump was a bear.

We saw mule deer after that, which under any other circumstances would have been a highlight. The trail had grown quiet, the light was starting to shift, and nine miles of canyon has a way of making the decision for you. We turned back.

On the way back to Inspiration Point, a moose was suddenly just there off the trail – eating leaves, unhurried, enormous. The distance between us was not very much, but the crowd around us made it feel safer than it actually was. I'd never had an accurate sense of how big a moose is. Now I do. We left before he decided to get any closer.

After nine miles, we sat down at Dornan’s and ate like people who had earned every bite. Elk bolognese. Pizza. Burrata salad. Tomato soup with bread. Cold beer. I had never eaten elk before in my life. Jackson felt like the right place to start.

Later: huckleberry ice cream in Jackson. Perfect.

A few days into the trip, the hiking had caught up with us. We gave ourselves some time to rest in the hotel room, and I was still replaying the canyon in my head, the cub flopping across her mother, Brandon and the bear on the trail, when we put on a documentary. For days, we’d been seeing the same grizzly in every photography and art store in town, this enormous bear surrounded by cubs, her face everywhere without a name attached. Now we had a name.

Grizzly 399 was the most famous bear in the world – a mother who raised cub after cub in these exact mountains, visible from the roadside for decades, beloved by generations of photographers and visitors who made the trip specifically to see her. What made her extraordinary was what she'd figured out: staying close to humans kept her cubs safe from male grizzlies, who kill cubs to bring females back into estrus. It worked. She raised litter after litter to independence, a survival rate almost unheard of in the wild. She had been photographed more than nearly any wild animal on earth, and she was the reason so many people fell in love with this valley.

She had died the previous fall. Hit by a car on a highway near Jackson, 10 months before we arrived.

We sat with that for a while.

Then we walked into the photography store across the street – the one belonging to the photographer who had spent decades documenting her. We found a book: her story, told in photographs. We were flipping through it at the back of the store when a staff member came over, and we told him we'd just watched the documentary.

He started talking about her. About what she had meant to the valley. About what it had been like when they got the news. His eyes filled while he was talking. So did mine.

It turns out there's a grief for things you never met: for losses that happened before you knew the name, in places you've only just arrived. I found it in a gift shop, holding a book about a bear I'd learned about that morning.

The whole town loved her. The whole town still does.

I went into Grand Teton nervous about bears. I left with a loyalty I didn’t expect – to a place and its creatures, to the feeling of standing quietly on a trail while a wild animal lives its life completely indifferent to your presence. Nothing in my South Florida upbringing had prepared me for any of it.

I think about her sometimes. I think that’s the point.