Ghost Grizzles: Does the Great Bear Still Haunt Colorado

Deep in the wilds of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains there may still lurk a remnant population of the continent’s most fearsome mammal: Ursus arctos horribilis. By 1952 it was widely assumed that the grizzly had been extirpated from Colorado. That is, until one September evening in 1979 when a hunting outfitter named Ed Wiseman was attacked by a four-hundred-pound golden-haired sow. The mauled but alive man (and the dead bear) confirmed what knowledgeable San Juan residents already knew: the Colorado grizzly was no ghost. What has happened since that encounter almost twenty years ago is the subject of this story about the bear and our own species in the wild—and what the future may hold for both.