Can humans learn to coexist with some of the largest, most ferocious animals on the landscape? Former park ranger Kevin Grange has followed this question — and his love for grizzly bears — to some of the wildest lands and waters in North America, documenting ways to give humans and grizzlies a better chance at survival.
Since childhood, award-winning author Kevin Grange has been fascinated with one of the most fearsome and misunderstood predators on the continent: grizzly bears. His passion has taken him to remote and colorful destinations, and he has spent many long, rugged days following in the pawprints of grizzlies — and occasionally having those pawprints charging back in his direction.
Now, Grange shares his wealth of bear knowledge and advice in a new book, “Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey into the Secret Life of North America’s Most Fearsome Predator.” In this episode, host Jennifer Errick asks Grange about the enduring charisma of bears, the many stories he uncovered in his research, and whether people truly can live in harmony with these 600-pound mammals.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
This episode was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to National Parks magazine Editor-in-Chief Rona Marech and Associate Editor Katherine DeGroff.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about Kevin Grange and his new book, “Grizzly Confidential,” at kevingrange.com
Read an excerpt from Kevin Grange’s visit to Katmai National Park and Preserve at npca.org/magazine and learn how you can subscribe to National Parks magazine to get in-depth reporting and storytelling on national park issues for just $15 a year.
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 34
In the Footsteps of Grizzlies
Jennifer Errick: Can humans learn to coexist with some of the largest, most ferocious animals on the landscape? Former Park Ranger Kevin Grange has followed this question and his love for grizzly bears from his home in Wyoming to some of the wildest lands and waters in North America.
In his new book, he documents how he overcame his fear of bears and shares ways to navigate safely through bear country, giving people and the grizzlies a better chance at survival.
I'm Jennifer Erick and this is The Secret Lives of Parks.
[Break]
Since childhood award-winning author Kevin Grange has been fascinated with one of the most fearsome and misunderstood predators on the continent, grizzly bears. His passion has taken him to remote and colorful destinations from a ranch where grizzlies are trained to perform on movie sets, to an ethically questionable captive wildlife facility, to the famed Brooks falls at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska where the stars of Fat Bear Week frolic for the camera.
Grange, a firefighter paramedic and former national park ranger has spent many long days following in the paw prints of grizzlies — and occasionally having those paw prints charging back in his direction.
Kevin Grange: I always loved bears. Growing up, I had my teddy bear and loved reading Winnie the Pooh. And then as I encountered my first black bear and grizzly bear in the wild, they seemed to me just like the epitome of wilderness, and I felt really connected to the wildness of our planet. And then I found once I saw the bears in the outdoors, it imbued the landscape with a sense of awe and mystery and beauty for me.
Jennifer Errick: Grange's lifelong mission to observe grizzlies, also known as brown bears, and to learn all he could to feel safe around them hasn't always gone the way he expected. Early on in his new book, Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey into the Secret Life of North America's Most Fearsome Predator, he describes a close-range encounter with a sow and her cubs along a tidal flat on Kodiak Island in Alaska. It's a moment when he fears the worst and is shocked when the mother bear barely pays him any mind. He admits, "My journey into the secret life of brown bears had already taught me that everything I thought I knew about them was wrong. Grizzlies aren't ferocious man-killers, nor are they cuddly teddy bears. Instead, they inhabit the fascinating landscape between these two extremes."
Chapter by chapter, Grange documents a series of expeditions into this middle zone of bear awareness, including trips to national parks and sanctuaries, research facilities and conferences, and even the moderated chat box where he educates people on grizzly behavior via his computer screen. Through all of his travels, he shares his joys and worries with other bear enthusiasts as they work to protect this revered, but often maligned keystone species.
This year, Fat Bear Week will officially start on October 2nd, kicking off a new round of worldwide excitement for these majestic and terror-inducing animals. This beloved online bear viewing event
encourages people to vote for their favorite grizzlies as they catch fish and put on pounds for hibernation, crowning a winner that Grange describes as “the chonkiest of the chonky.” You can read an excerpt of his experience at Katmai in the new fall issue of National Parks Magazine.
I spoke with Grange last June about the enduring charisma of bears, the many stories he uncovered in his research and whether people can truly live in harmony with 600-pound mammals that can, in his words, "... crush a bowling ball with one bite and kill a massive elk with sudden swipe of a mighty paw."
Kevin Grange: I just always loved bears seeing them, reading about them, looking up at the Big Dipper, the Great Bear. It just seemed like bears were everywhere in my life. And then, what's amazing is, the more you learn, the more fascinating they get.
Jennifer Errick: Most of your book, it feels like this wild oscillation between abject terror and pure glee. Is that fair? And if so, how did you hold these extreme emotions as you're going through and researching and writing this work?
Kevin Grange: The call to adventure for the book was when the famed bear 399, who's the matriarch of the Tetons, when she took a walk about around my neighborhood in South Park of Jackson Hole. And I realized, well, I knew intellectually that brown bears were throughout the landscape, not just in national parks, when it registered emotionally, it was like you said, that fight or flight, terrified feeling. So I guess as a first responder and as a writer, I wanted to go into that discomfort and I wanted to learn all I could about brown bears, see if I could understand them and answer the important question of how could we coexist. So I'm working with those two feelings of fascination and terror throughout the journey and throughout the book, and as you mentioned, I arrived at that point of coexistence is possible and I love having them on the landscape and they bring so much joy and important elements into the ecosystem.
Jennifer Errick: Obviously, this is a huge fascination, something that you're very motivated by, learning about bears, and there are so many different perspectives that you bring into this book — the movie industry, self-defense, hunters, all kinds of people. Did you go into this always imagining it would be a book? How did this start?
Kevin Grange: With apex predators, be it brown bears, wolves, great white sharks, they're only really in the news when they do something bad. And so, when I worked at Yellowstone and Yosemite and Grand Teton, as I'd see the bears in the distance in Hayden Valley, Lamar, Pacific Creek, I always had a sense that I only knew the smallest slice of their story. And so I really wanted to just go in and explore all the facets of brown bears, the physiology, the myth and spiritual perspective, how they are ecosystem engineers and the hierarchy of bears or that dance of dominance that they have. And then all the biologists that I spoke with, everyone just loves their big personalities. And that's what really comes through once the bears aren't food stressed, when they have some of those needs met nutritionally, then you just see this wide fascinating range of behavior.
Jennifer Errick: Yes, and you get to that point a few times in the book where you're in these very wild landscapes that are actually able to support bears, not just at a subsistence level, but at a level of abundance where you truly can have bears in community versus in competition.
Kevin Grange: Yes, exactly. Not only do you see personalities, you just see a lot of behaviors that people didn't realize bears could do. You see Sal is adopting orphan bears. You see family groups spending time together. And you even see adult males hanging out with 2-year-old young bears, whereas typically people thought adult males would predate the young bears. So that's the cool thing of looking at bears on individual level because you really learn some of those individual personalities and behaviors.
Jennifer Errick: I want to talk a little bit more about the book generally, because you really do have so many diverse voices in this, of all these very different people. Were there particular aspects of the reporting that were especially enlightening for you, as someone who knows a lot about bears?
Kevin Grange: Yeah, definitely as a paramedic, I was drawn to the hibernation physiology and some of the work that's being done at the Washington State University Bear Center because I've treated these patients on the ambulance, diabetic patients, patients suffering from strokes and cardiac arrest, and I've seen just the tragedy and the suffering that that can bring to families. And so, at Washington State Bear Center, they're studying that brown bears, when they go into hibernation, they're able to switch on and off their insulin sensitivity like flipping a switch and they can gain all this weight but not get high blood pressure, coronary artery disease or diabetes. Their heart rate can drop to eight to 10 beats per minute, yet their blood doesn't clot and somehow their organs are still perfused. So, the paramedic in me loves that, and just the potential for the secrets of the brown bear to help treat human afflictions was, to me, endlessly fascinating.
And then another part was just realizing that bears aren't out to get us learning about bears and knowing what they need to exist and that they really live by a ticking clock, that they have to get enough nutrition and fat before they hibernate. And just knowing how we can coexist and work with them was a great point to learn.
Jennifer Errick: You have this just amazing story toward the end where you are in the wild with the bears and you have this moment where the biggest, most dominant bear of all is charging directly toward you, and you just have this moment where you're like, "Well, he's charging toward me, but he's not coming at me." It feels like you really got so zen with that bear?
Kevin Grange: Yeah, I did, and I think the great learning curve for me is a lot of biologists say a bear's world is ruled by behavior. So for me, just learning to understand that behavior and what a stressed bear looks like versus a lot of people think when the bear stands tall on two legs he's about to attack, but in reality he's trying to see you or smell you a little bit more. So I think as I learned that behavior, I became more comfortable around bears, knowing what they need, knowing their behavior, and then knowing what I can do to not stress them out or not to displace them, whether I'm hiking or fishing or mountain bike riding.
Jennifer Errick: Those are some of the real fun parts in the book. Were there parts that were especially difficult for you?
Kevin Grange: To me, it was difficult that there is still a lot of anti-predator hysteria out there. I live in Jackson Hole in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and there's still what they call vandal killings. They just don't like bears and there's this idea of shoot, shovel and shut up.
Jennifer Errick: And can you explain that?
Kevin Grange: No, it's like if you see a grizzly, the only good bear is a bear. So you shoot the bear in the wild, you bury it, and then you just shut up. You don't mention it. And so there's been a number of those around me in Island Park, Idaho, in Cody, Wyoming. So that was difficult to see. And then just learning that some of these old beliefs are still very much alive in people. And just hearing the fear and the hatred that some people have towards brown bears, which I think is ultimately due to a lot of misunderstanding about them.
Jennifer Errick: Yeah, that stuck out for me as well, just some of these accounts of bears just riddled with bullets and how hard it is to catch people who do this. Some of it just was truly shocking to me.
Kevin Grange: So, I guess the challenges that bears have can be a little distressing at times. I mean even just within their own species. But there's always hope. One of the things about the book that was great is I met so many wonderful people, biologists, people working with conservation agencies just doing great work. So even though I learned of the struggles that brown bears faced, ultimately I was left hopeful for their future.
Jennifer Errick: At NPCA, we bring you stories from behind the scenes at national parks because we want you to feel the excitement and exhilaration of being part of these wild landscapes and turning points in history. We believe if you learn about a park, you'll want to visit it. If you visit it, you'll fall in love with it. And if you love it, you'll want to defend it. If you are already hooked on your public lands and the incredible stories they tell, you can help share this wonder by subscribing to this podcast. And if you're moved leaving us a positive review, it really does help us reach more people with our advocacy for America's most inspirational places, our national parks. Thank you as always for listening.
As you're planning these trips, you bring your wife Megan along for many of these adventures. Does she share that level of fascination and enthusiasm, because she seems really involved and excited by a lot of these journeys too?
Kevin Grange: Yes, it was great having her travel with me and she's got an adventuresome spirit and she loves travel and she's had a lot of crazy stories or experiences with bears. She lived in Lake Tahoe and found a black bear in her shower once. And she was a kayaking guide in Yellowstone, so she's had grizzlies come into our camp. They all ended safely. But I think the main learning curve for both of us was that the best practice is staying safe in bear country, it really depends on where you are, what activity you're doing, and also what season it is. So we learned that these coastal brown bears are a lot different than the Yellowstone bears or the Grand Teton bears who are unfortunately kind of always food stressed, a little bit displaced and a little more on edge. Whereas some of those coastal Alaskan bears, it's like a portly guy sitting on his couch and he's got his fridge right next to him and remote control on the other hand. So they're a lot more relaxed just because they don't have that food stress.
Jennifer Errick: I love that characterization. They're really big though.
Kevin Grange: Oh, they're huge.
Jennifer Errick: From sitting on the couch and having the food right there. They get really large. So, I mean on first sighting, I bet that would be very scary?
Kevin Grange: No, it was. And also those curious sub-adult bears, they probably never seen a human. They want to walk over to you and just, not in an aggressive way, but just in a curious way. So, I wish everyone could go up to Alaska to do some bear viewing up there just because it really gives you another side of brown bears. It's possible here in the Lower 48 if we work towards it and we have that discipline to live with bears.
Jennifer Errick: Well, so you planned this adventure to Katmai, to the Brooks Falls, and it was just a week or two before this annual fat bear competition. How hard was it for you to plan this trip out to Katmai?
Kevin Grange: The planning was challenging, but it was also fun. And we were only there for a day, and so basically with Katmai, you can either stay in one of the cabins, which is highly competitive, or you can stay in a campground which is surrounded by electric fence, or you can fly in from the day from either Anchorage or Kodiak Island. So we were there for the day, and to me, seeing those bears on the lip of Brooks Falls, that's really an iconic national park moment, I'd say on par with seeing Old Faithful or Yosemite Valley. So yeah, we flew to Anchorage and then to Kodiak, and then we took a seaplane over to Katmai.
Jennifer Errick: So you got to experience all of that in one day? That's a lot.
Kevin Grange: Yeah, no, and the cool thing with Katmai is every visit starts with everyone attending a mandatory bear school. I love this idea that they don't manage the bears. What they do is they manage the people, and so you show up, you attend this bear school, which is really interesting and informative, and then you get to walk out on the hiking trail to get to the platforms to see the bears. And it's just magical when you learn about the hierarchy and what bears are spread out along the river based on where they fall and that dominance paradigm and just seeing the interactions with each other. And also the personalities because each bear is using a different technique to fish.
Jennifer Errick: You even have one source talk about bear charisma, and I love that phrase because that's so much of what comes across even over a webcam, you really get to see the individual nature of each bear.
Kevin Grange: Yeah, it's just so fun seeing the interaction, and I joke that between June and October, there's always those bear cams playing in the background on my computer, so my productivity level at work goes down because I'm always curious what bears are on the river now? What are they doing? Who has cubs? And that type of thing.
Jennifer Errick: I think my biggest laugh in that chapter perhaps in the whole book is you jokingly refer to it as the Real Housewives of Brooks Falls, where you're talking about some of the drama that plays out as well. What made you want to characterize it that way?
Kevin Grange: Yeah, that just came to me in the writing process. But I guess just seeing the way sows will interact with one another in the males will battle for a specific fishing spot. It just has that sort of drama. But I think the bear cams also teach other lessons. One time a bear showed up with a snare around its neck from a hunter that was probably hunting for wolves, and so the bear cams teach conservation lessons too.
One thing on Katmai, I guess I'd like to just say it's really accessible and it's safe, and so I encourage everyone to visit it. Sometimes it seems so remote and far away and hard to get to, but with these guiding services, it's really easy, and it's somewhat expensive, but I think everyone should try to get out there if they can.
Jennifer Errick: One of my favorite moments when you're at Katmai is, despite yourself, there's this moment where one of the bears catches this fish in this really dramatic way, and you start cheering even though you were specifically told not to do that. And of course your wife immediately is like, "Oh my God, you're that guy."
It just for me summarized so much of what's in the book. You're trying so hard, you're learning so much to do these best practices because you want to coexist with bears. You want this to be a safe place for bears and for people, but at the end of the day, you're a person. And so it was like the natural normal thing. So can you share a little of what was going through your mind while that was playing out?
Kevin Grange: Sure. I think just knowing the struggles that bears have, they show up at Brooks River with scars and some of them are limping and the high cub mortality. So I went into Katmai knowing that they have an uphill battle and every day they're adapting and overcoming. And so once I got to the platform, there was just one bear on the lip of the falls that day. It was mid-September. So just seeing the bear there and then just seeing him miss the salmon jumping up a few times. So you keep getting more and more involved in rooting for him internally because you want him to get that fish so he can put on that weight. You see all these missed chances and you're getting more excited and the anticipation. And then once he finally caught that fish, I just let out this cheer, which of course was not the right thing to do. But luckily it didn't change his behavior, and I don't think he even heard it.
But you raise a good point, it's like we love bears and were rooting for, but there is that fine line. So here in the Tetons you have the roadside bears, and so part of me really wants to see the bears, but then also part of me knows, hey, if I pull over, I'm one of 100 vehicles who are going to attract more vehicles. So it's a fine line to walk, and sometimes I'll stop and maybe sometimes I won't just because there's too much going on and maybe the bear is starting to get stressed.
Jennifer Errick: That's a lot of thoughtfulness that goes into those moments, because I do think the human instinct is like, "Oh my God, a bear. I want to see that."
Kevin Grange: I guess one way I've changed from having taken this journey is I think I am more thoughtful here in the Tetons now that I know where the bears are. I'm probably not going to hike there because I like this idea of we have our space and then the bears have their space, and there's a lot of other hiking trails where there could be a grizzly or a black bear, but it's not their prime area. So I think I'm more thoughtful in that and giving them their space, respecting that space, and then hoping that they in turn respect the human space.
Jennifer Errick: That definitely comes across throughout the book is always trying to define those spaces and to interpret what's happening in the bear world while you're looking at them from your human perspective too. But now you're also an expert who helps to facilitate those conversations.
Kevin Grange: Yes. My journey's been from being terrified at brown bears and not sure if I'm a bear person and do I want them on the landscape to now being an advocate for bears. And one of the ways I do that is I serve as a chat moderator for the webcams at Katmai just to help interpret bears for people, whether it's behavior, whether it's where bears are positioned on the river, maybe it's best practices traveling in bear country. So that's one of the ways I like to give back. And it's also a nice way because four hours each week I get to just watch the bear cams, and then also hopefully help the species and answer some questions.
Jennifer Errick: As you go through the course of the book, it is always dancing around this question of coexistence, right? Because bears are deadly and people are deadly, and to be able to exist together, we have to really try. But you're optimistic. Can you tell me about your take on coexistence and why you're optimistic?
Kevin Grange: I guess I'm optimistic on coexistence because I've seen that it works and then I've seen that with just a little discipline on behalf of people to secure their trash, secure their garbage and compost. These small little actions can just have big rewards, and it's the difference between a bear coming to your backyard and staying there and getting food conditioned, which is not a good thing, or just a bear moving through your backyard because there's nothing to eat. If we're able to coexist with something that is that intelligent, that complex and is at the top of the food chain, we're also coexisting with everything underneath that. And to me, the discipline, it has great rewards, and I've found that it's fun to feel humbled and small in the big face of nature.
Jennifer Errick: Grange fully embraces this transformation in a passage describing his experience at McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage, Alaska. McNeil is a place where people have lived alongside bears for nearly 60 years, maintaining a small camp and reinforcing mindful safety rules that prioritize the bear's comfort in their habitat.
"Gazing out," he writes, "I realized something had changed in me during my time at McNeil. Bears could be taught and trusted. I also had faith that with just a little discipline and effort, humans could coexist with grizzlies. And most important, I was no longer afraid of brown bears. I'd always be extremely cautious and carry bear spray in grizzly country, but the paralyzing fear had disappeared."
Grange continues, "Perhaps the greatest part of learning about grizzlies was my travels to amazing places and meeting a host of people, biologists, guides, naturalists, caretakers, teachers, trainers, pilots, scientists and sportsmen who truly care about our world and are working hard to conserve it. I hadn't expected that my quest to learn about the secret life of brown bears would also reveal some of the best parts of humanity."
[End theme]
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 34, In the Footsteps of Grizzlies, was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to National Parks Magazine Editor-in-Chief Rona Marech and Associate Editor Katherine DeGroff.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about Kevin Grange and his new book, “Grizzly Confidential,” at kevingrange.com.
Read an excerpt from Kevin Grange's visit to Katmai National Park and Preserve at npca.org/magazine and learn how you can subscribe to National Parks Magazine to get in-depth reporting and storytelling on national park issues for just $15 a year.
Learn more about this podcast at thesecretlivesofparks.org.
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America's national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation's only independent non-partisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we're proud of it too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org.