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Big Sky Country | Lotsa bears around here——see them in groups, which was unheard of a few yrs ago——7 togethor about 10 miles east, ——-maybe 20 yrs ago fish & wildlife did a ‘Bear hair snare’——they’d make a little fence outa Barb wire, bait it, put up another fence farther out—-to keep cows away——come back and collect hair from inner one and DNA it—-
They’d estimated 200 grizzly’s on east side of continental divide—-from hi way 200 on south to south side glacier nat park/hi way 2. Results showed 600. Been increasing ever since, my buddys who guide in the Bob—-Bob marshal wilderness—-say they come to rifle shots and gut piles—-multiple confrontations every fall—-most years a couple get killed for attacking people, killing cows—-we have no hunting season on them—
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In October 2023, an adult male grizzly bear was confirmed on American Prairie’s PN Ranch near Winifred, Montana, at the confluence of the Judith and Missouri rivers. The ranch sits in the Upper Missouri River Breaks, more than 100 miles east of the Rocky Mountain Front. It was the first confirmed grizzly in that country in over a century.
Daniel Kinka, American Prairie’s wildlife restoration manager, noted that nobody presently alive in central Montana remembers when grizzlies were last on the prairie. Wesley Sarmento, a bear management specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, added that grizzly tracks had actually been found near Winifred the year before, and that bears had already pushed a few miles farther east.
Three years earlier, in June 2020, wildlife officials confirmed a young male grizzly near Big Sandy, about 80 miles northeast of Great Falls and 125 miles east of the mountain front. At the time, the state called it the farthest east a grizzly had been documented in Montana since the 1890s. Moving more than 10 miles a day, the young boar raided a bag of dog food, killed two chickens, and kept walking.
He was doing what young male grizzlies do when the country behind them fills up. Around Glacier National Park, the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem now holds well over 1,000 grizzlies. With the core mountain territory at capacity, young males getting pushed out by dominant boars are following creek bottoms out onto the plains.
Over the last several years, state biologists have verified grizzlies in the Little Belt Mountains, the Snowy Mountains, the Moccasin Mountains, the Shields Valley, and the Pryor Mountains south of Billings. Back in 2017, Montana hired a dedicated prairie bear manager based in Conrad, an hour east of the mountains, simply because grizzlies were showing up in wheat fields and river bottoms as a regular occurrence. When federal Endangered Species Act protections began in 1975, fewer than 1,000 grizzlies survived in the entire lower 48 states. Today, they are walking back into valleys they have not occupied in 130 years.
Grizzlies evolved on the open plains, where massive body size and long front claws were built for digging roots, excavating rodent burrows, and dominating buffalo carcasses in open country. When Lewis and Clark pushed up the Missouri River in 1805, they ran into grizzlies constantly along the prairie river bottoms.
The PN Ranch bear was standing in shortgrass prairie with a 100-mile sightline in every direction, following thickets of chokecherries and buffalo berries along the river breaks. He was not lost. He was using the exact habitat his species was built for.
Historically, brown bears reached even farther east across North America. Moravian fur traders on the Atlantic coast of Labrador recorded buying brown bear pelts from hunters through the 1830s and 1850s. In 1975, Harvard archaeologists excavating an 18th-century Inuit midden on Okak Island in Labrador dug up a verified grizzly bear skull, marking the easternmost record of the species on the continent before that isolated population vanished in the early 20th century.
Further north, a similar eastward push is playing out right now along Hudson Bay. Research led by Doug Clark at the University of Saskatchewan found that grizzly sightings in northern Manitoba have doubled every decade since the 1980s. In July 2025, an Inuit hunter shot an adult grizzly just four kilometers outside Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, in country where local elders grew up barely knowing what a brown bear looked like.
In Montana, state bear manager Jamie Jonkel described the current expansion onto the plains as the last real window for grizzlies to reclaim historic range. For the bears following the cottonwood corridors down the Missouri River, it is not new ground at all.
Image is for illustration purposes only.
Source: American Prairie / Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks / Cowboy State Daily / Billings Gazette / Montana Public Radio / MeatEater / Spiess & Cox (1976), Arctic / Clark et al. (2022), Arctic / Nunatsiaq News / RMEF
Edited by littlejo 10/17/2026 13:25
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Grizzly Bears—just poster for interest
