A large grizzly bear looks through the trees in Yellowstone.
SEELEY LAKE - Chuck Jonkel recently passed away after a distinguish career of being recognized as one of the leading bear authorities.
More than three decades ago, Jonkel made tracks in the Seeley Lake area as the idea of protecting grizzly bear, including transplanting them to recover their population and enlarge their occupied habitat, was beginning to jell.
In the early 1980s, I remember him making a presentation about the grizzly bear situation to what was then the Seeley-Condon Chamber of Commerce. Several members were concerned that having griz running around our forest would discourage tourists, making them fearful to spend leisure time here.
He responded on the contrary, predicting that having wild grizzlies would actually be a tourist attraction to the area. He predicted the idea of not being at the top of the food chain should be intriguing to many. Even now, our stretch of the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail in the Blackfoot Valley is the only section where one is liable to see a grizzly.
A year or so later, Jonkel made another appearance in early winter at the Seeley Lake Ranger Station with a small female grizzly bear in a box. He had done his magic to induce early hibernation with a feeding/refrigeration regimen, intending to place it in a wild place so that when it woke up it would be in a new home. We drove up the West Fork Clearwater Road as far as we could, and then transferred his box of bear onto my snowmobile sled.
We snowmobiled up the West Fork for quite a ways until we found a nice big subalpine fir with a tree well suitable to place the bear in a box. We tossed some branches over the box and then buried it in snow, except for the door. Jostling around on the snowmobile trailer and sled must have aroused Missy bear because we could hear her rustling around. Chuck said never fear, she'd go back to sleep and he'd come back in a couple days and open the door so she'd have her freedom the next spring. I moved to Oregon the next May so never heard how she fared after that.
I hope some of her lineage is still making claw marks in our shared turf.
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