Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center
Our episode: [Detour] West Yellowstone Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center | Why can't you feed a bear?
A grizzly named Bo worked the lid of a cooler with his claws, then sat on it. The lid held. Bo is here because one didn’t hold before: a cooler, a pickup, a tent, and finally a car with people inside.
The Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center is a nonprofit wildlife park a block from Yellowstone’s west entrance, open since 1993. Its bears are animals that lost the argument with people. Big and Little carried a bucket into the pen before opening and hid food under rocks and branches. A grizzly flipped a rock the size of a basketball with one paw.
The center is one of two facilities in the country approved to test bear-resistant containers for the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee: sixty minutes in the habitat, baited, no help. The pass rate hovers around half, which is why a certified cooler’s sticker means something.
West Yellowstone sits in the homelands of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and the Eastern Shoshone, two of the 27 nations the National Park Service counts as associated with Yellowstone.
The bears get the food either way. The cooler is the thing being judged.