Grizzlies historically roamed what today is North Cascade National Park and the surrounding Wilderness and wildlands of north-central Washington—and we should help grizzlies return to this landscape. To that end, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service released a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that evaluates options for returning grizzly bears to the North Cascades Ecosystem.
Wilderness Watch fully supports recovering a healthy grizzly bear population in the North Cascades, but the effort must be done in a way that protects and enhances the area’s wilderness character and that also minimizes the human handling and harassment of grizzlies.
The grizzly bear recovery area includes North Cascades National Park, 638,173 acres of which is designated the Stephen Mather Wilderness. Two other Wilderness areas bordering North Cascades National Park—the 531,325-acre Pasayten Wilderness and the 119,966-acre Mount Baker Wilderness—are also part of recovery area for grizzlies. Wilderness protection requires seeking ways to recover the area’s grizzly population that avoids the use of helicopters, motor vehicles and equipment, electronic installations, and trammeling or manipulating the landscape or its wildlife.
Unfortunately, the current action alternatives would involve about 50 to 400 helicopter landings and twice that many helicopter flights. All, or almost all, landings would apparently be in Wilderness, either in North Cascades National Park or in surrounding national forests. The extensive use of helicopters would continue indefinitely for monitoring and managing bear movement and numbers. This heavy-handed management would be detrimental to Wilderness and bears alike. Grizzly bears would be collared, drugged, samples taken, released in Wilderness, re-collared and re-sampled, if determined necessary, for many years. Any young grizzlies born in the Wildernesses may also be subjected to this invasive management.
There are no alternatives that look at less invasive or non-invasive means of grizzly reintroduction or recovery, and no natural recovery alternative. Neither of the current action alternatives, involving translocating bears from other regions, is compatible with Wilderness. The action alternatives should be modified to avoid helicopter landings and flights in Wilderness, the placement and use of telemetry installations, and steer clear of heavy-handed management of bears. There are many roads that bisect or penetrate the recovery area or dead-end next to Wildernesses that could provide release sites without the use of helicopters inside Wilderness.
A natural recovery alternative must be fully developed and analyzed, even if recovery would take longer than active repopulation. For the long-term success of grizzly restoration, natural recovery measures must also be included in both action alternatives thus reducing the need for wilderness degrading activities that are also ultimately bad for bears. This requires work with partners in British Columbia to ensure that grizzlies have corridors to move back and forth across the international border and to prevent a small North Cascades grizzly population from shrinking over time and becoming inbred.
The no action alternative has many good Bear Smart components on how people and communities can coexist with grizzly bears and these coexistence measures should also be included in both of the action alternatives. All possible measures must be taken to prepare residents and visitors for bears, particularly given the dramatic growth of the human population in the region and rapidly increasing recreation pressures in the Park.
The federal agencies also propose under their preferred alternative (Alternative C) that the grizzlies moved to the North Cascades would be designated as a nonessential experimental population under section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This means that a grizzly that is fully protected under the ESA in Montana could be taken from her Montana home range, dropped into the North Cascades, lose full protections under the ESA, and essentially be killed and harassed with fewer restrictions. This is unethical and must not be allowed to happen.
Wilderness Watch has serious concerns that the urgency for the current proposal, combined with a 10j experimental listing under the ESA, is more about safeguarding agency discretion than it is about protecting Wilderness and creating the best environment for grizzly bears to migrate, live, and thrive.
In 2023, North Cascades National Park Superintendent Striker told newspapers that changing conditions in Canada could mean naturally migrating grizzlies “may be down here before you know it.” If bears migrate on their own, they have full protection under the ESA. Striker advocated for faster human-facilitated reintroduction stating, this way, “you can decide on different rules on how you are going to manage those endangered species … [you can] define how we should treat bears, where do we want them, where don’t we want them.” Whereas, with migrating bears with full ESA protection, Striker worried, “We are going to be stuck with normal fish and wildlife rules that say you pretty much can’t do anything” to the bears.
- Read our comments on the 2023 DEIS
- Read our comments on the proposed 10(j) rule
- Read our 2022 scoping comments
- Read our 2019 DEIS comments
- Read our 2017 DEIS comments
Photo: Sam Parks
