Article by Allen Best
Wildlife – February 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
TWICE IN HIS 42 YEARS Brad Phelps has seen the strange sight of crickets above timberline, hundreds of thousands of them, so thick that several were squashed with every step. The first time he observed this spectacle was in the 1980s when he was archery hunting in the La Garita Wilderness Area between Saguache and Creede.
The second time, on September 20, 2006, near Independence Pass, he saw something even more remarkable: a grizzly bear sow and her two cubs. “This is the only grizzly experience I’ve had or expect to have in western Colorado,” said Phelps.
But Colorado wildlife officers aren’t so sure Phelps saw a grizzly. Neither are wildlife officers from Montana and Wyoming, who routinely field reports of grizzly bears in places they are not believed to be. Invariably grizzly that are reportedly sighted in these other states -which do have grizzlies, but in isolated regions — turn out to be relatively commonplace black bears. It’s an easy mistake to make, say wildlife biologists. Despite their name, black bears are often brown and can be quite large, which are traits that make them look like grizzlies, and from certain perspectives they may even seem to have the dish face that defines grizzlies.
“We investigate at least 10 reports a year in the lower portion of the Winds (Wind River Range) around Lander,” wrote Dave Moody, a wildlife official in the Wyoming Fish and Game Department. “To date, all have been black bears,” he added in his e-mail message to Colorado wildlife officers who had been seeking his advice after the September report.
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“We get a couple of these types of reports each week,” wrote Montana’s Chris Servheen when asked for insights by Colorado wildlife officials. “The general protocol is to try and talk to the reporters and ask them why they thought it was a grizzly bear without using leading questions like did it have a hump? A verbal report in and of itself is not sufficient to document grizzly bear occurrence.”
The fact that the Colorado wildlife biologists took his report seriously is due to Phelps’s considerable familiarity with bears, both grizzly and black. A fourth-generation Coloradan, he has been to Alaska twice, first in 1994 and then again in 2004, and both times he saw plenty of bears, both black and grizzly. “I have been around a lot of live black bears, and a lot of dead black bears, and in fact I’m standing under a stuffed black bear head,” he said when reached two months after his sighting.
Also with him that morning in September in the Sawatch Range southwest of Leadville was Scott Ruttman, of Anchorage, Alaska, who similarly has seen and hunted bears. The two were hunting bighorn sheep. Ruttman, defying non-resident odds of 1 in 800, had drawn a license. Despite the 1-in-120 odds of a resident, Phelps got no license. The pair, says Phelps, had “glassed” three rams, studying them through binoculars and spotting scopes, but the rams were too young. So they continued down the road. They ended up west of the settlement of Twin Lakes, in McNasser Gulch, about three and a half miles from Highway 82.
AFTER PARKING THEIR TRUCK, Phelps and Ruttman climbed through the patches of snow lingering from a storm two days before, and hiked up the ridge to about 11,200 feet, just shy of timberline. “I was puffing like a train,” remembers Phelps. Ahead was a Grizzly Peak, one of several so-named mountains in Colorado. That’s when they saw the bears moving away from them at a fast walk.
Phelps estimates he was 60 to 100 yards from the bears when he first saw them. The sow was in the lead, heading into timber, the cubs trailing. The sow, he told state wildlife officers two days later, was at least 450 pounds, 150 to 250 pounds larger than any black bear he had seen, and perhaps seven feet long, if skinned and with its hide laid out. The cubs he figured at 200 to 230 pounds, again much larger than any black bears cubs he had seen. The bears ran from tan to yellow-brown, each with a noticeable hump just behind the head. Both Phelps and Ruttman said the ears were clearly smaller than what is common on a black bear. Phelps estimated he watched for 45 seconds to a minute, and during that time he saw the sow turn to look at her cubs. It looked to Phelps like a slightly upturned face.
The crickets, he believes, are what drew the bears to the area. The sow could not ignore so much protein at a time just before hibernation. “She made a mistake and got seen,” says Phelps, “and then I made a mistake and sold her out to the Division of Wildlife.”
PHELPS WOULD SEEM a credible witness. He grew up hunting bears and chasing cows in the Gunnison Country and now lives on a ranch along Tomichi Creek, east of Gunnison. He makes his living as a cop in Crested Butte, trained to carefully note what he sees. Even so, when the report arrived in Monte Vista at the desk of Jerry Apker, the state’s carnivore biologist, Apker was unpersuaded. Both Phelps and Ruttman had seen many bears, but with enough gaps to make them less than perfect expert witnesses.
Too, there were gaps within their sightings. The size, color, and gait that the two had believed were signs of grizzly he dismissed out of hand. “Large bears in Colorado, especially in the fall, often display a bleached color on the body, especially on the back,” Apker wrote in an e-mail mailed to colleagues two days later. That bleaching tends to emphasize the shoulder, and from some angles, makes the hump look more pronounced than it really is. Size can also be deceiving, he said, as there was no frame of reference.
“I do not dispute that both Brad and Scott will firmly believe that they have seen a sow and two cub grizzly bears,” said Apker. “But based on the report, I wouldn’t stake my professional reputation by telling people we found grizzlies in the Collegiates. At this point my money would be on them having seen a very large black bear sow with two cubs, probably not YOY (first-year) cubs, but from the previous year still tagging along.”
Reports of grizzly bears in Colorado are filed sporadically, (just two or three times since Apker assumed his current job in 2000). One purported grizzly was documented with a photo, but the photo clearly revealed to Apker that it was an ordinary black bear. Evidence that could help verify a siting would be a paw print preserved in a cast or, even better, scat or hair samples.
Visual sightings, such as those near Independence Pass, ordinarily would not be followed by subsequent research but for two things. First, Phelps — a former Colorado Wildlife Commission board member — and Ruttman have both had experience with both black bears and grizzlies. A professional guide, Ruttman said he hunted nearly 100 grizzly. And second, state wildlife authorities have been wrong before.
Grizzly bears had been thought to have been extirpated from Colorado after a federal trapper, Ernie Wilkinson, who still lives at Monte Vista, poisoned a grizzly in Starvation Gulch, on the upper Rio Grande drainage southwest of Creede. That was in 1952. In 1979, however, bowhunting guide Ed Wiseman of Creede killed a sow grizzly with an arrow — in defense, he said — farther south in the San Juans.
FURTHER RESEARCH, evidence and speculation, reported by Durango-based author David Petersen in a 1995 book called Ghost Grizzlies, yielded the conclusion that additional grizzly bears likely remain near the New Mexico border, quite possibly Colorado’s most remote area (because so much of the land is private), but not in sustainable numbers.
Other bear tales have also prompted speculation about whether the grizzlies are really gone. The story is told that a grizzly bear in the early 1980s was released on Mt. Shavano by John Norris, a Salida trust-funder who did keep a mountain lion in a cage. And another story has it that an Aspen-based wildlife filmmaker let loose a grizzly bear.
But even if such local legends did not exist, Coloradans might well want to see grizzly bears, as part of our mythic backstory of wilderness. It’s surely no accident that Denver-based Frontier Airlines has bears, lynx, and foxes on the tails of its airplanes, rather than springer spaniels, Irish setters. or yellow tabbies. At the National Western Stock Show in January, booth after booth sells lamps and candles depicting wolves, not German shepherds.
Wolves were thought to have disappeared from Colorado even earlier than grizzly bears. The last one was nailed — again by a government trapper, and again in the San Juans — in 1943. Yet stories linger of wolves. One persistent locale for reports is near the old mining camp of Gilman, between Minturn and Leadville. Several people — male and female, black and white — have insisted they have seen a wolf there along Highway 24 late at night.
In fact, some people probably do see wolves — but escaped hybrids, says Joe Lewandowski, a Division of Wildlife spokesman based in Durango. Coyotes, although generally weighing only 20 to 30 pounds, can also sometimes get big -perhaps big enough to be confused with a wolf, he says. But while Colorado has had two confirmed cases of wolves in recent years that have wandered south from Yellowstone, first on I-70 near Idaho Springs and the second north of Walden, state wildlife personnel take most reports with a large measure of salt. And yes, he says, they get many.
For proof of the grizzly near Independence Pass, Phelps and his companion had no corroborating evi- dence. With a snow only two days later, others could find no evidence, either. Wyoming’s Moody wrote in an e-mail to Apker that the evidence didn’t add up. Grizzly sows with cubs within 60 yards of people, he said, will usually charge those people. “They rarely, if ever, simply walk away from humans at this distance,” he said.
He also concluded that for a grizzly sow to have cubs in September in Central Colorado, that almost certainly required that a male grizzly be nearby. Grizzly and black bears do not mate. “It is highly unlikely that this female migrated over 300 miles from Wyoming, the closest occupied habitat to Central Colorado. This fact, alone, makes me question the validity of this being a grizzly bear. Our experience with a slowly expanding population is that people know they are present. They are either seen by the public or get into trouble,” he wrote to Apker.
“Jerry, to be brutally honest, I’m not sure I’d invest the money and manpower that you’re contemplating with either aerial surveys now or the hair corrals next summer. I really believe that because of the lack of specifics, that this sighting is somewhat suspect. As an agency, I’d simply file it and see what happens,” he wrote. Informing the public would, he added, only result in more calls — and more work. “I’ve learned never to say never, but be careful that you don’t over react this and create additional demands on your personnel.”
Disregarding that advice, the Colorado agency sent personnel to look for paw prints and other evidence, had a helicopter fly overhead, as well as a three-passenger plane. The efforts yielded only evidence of a big black bear in the area.
THE NEXT POSSIBLE STEPS are snags designed to yield hair that can be tested. That method will detect, with a 90 percent confidence, the presence of a male or a female in the area, says Aker. Cost: $10,000 to $200,000. Also possible are camera monitors. Apker says he is dubious of finding anything, but the research will at least yield a firmer idea of how many black bears are in the area.
In Gunnison, Phelps says he’s not comfortable talking about what he saw. He frets about the publicity given his sighting, about the repercussions. But neither is he comfortable having his testimony questioned. “I don’t want to have to punch somebody in the nose for calling me a liar,” he said. “The fact is: I saw a grizzly bear and two cubs. It was a very good experience, something I never, ever expected to happen.”
Based in Old Town Arvada, Allen Best writes for many publications which pay better than Colorado Central and has edited several ski-town newspapers.
