It’s high summer, and for Park Rangers, keeping an eye on bears is easy next to managing the people who have come to see them.

Park Ranger Travis: Hey guys? Take one quick and move it on. (Radio talk …)

Park Ranger: You gotta remember these animals are pretty fast and they’re aggressive, and the only two times I’ve ever been charged, well, I’ve been charged four times, but two times were at bear jams. You get in these situations where you just forget about where you’re at and suddenly you’re within from me to Doug from a bear and two cubs. And that’s a bad place to be. This is hard work and people just don’t listen. You know, they’re all excited and they want to see a bear …

Ranger: These guys can run thirty-five plus miles an hour. You really want to make sure we’re keeping ourselves safe and these bears …

Tourist: Okay, well, that’s a zoom too, I mean, I was zoomed in, I wasn’t that close ….

Back to the road! Let’s go!

Ranger Bob: There are bears in the Indian Creek area that have really worked on the garbage cans, and some of the places you can see scratch marks on the top where bears have been after the garbage can. But, they haven’t gotten in ‘em!

Shane: It works, huh?

Ranger Bob: You bet it works!

The first step in keeping bears alive is preventing them from breaking into people’s trash and food stores. At the Grizzly Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, container designs are “tested” by the experts.

Bear Expert: It’s going to be bolted down in a campground. It’s self-resetting. You don’t depend on the camper to remember anything or make any effort.

Bear Expert: They won’t get into the latch, but the pouncing on here, if it caves in it could create a gap right here and that would be the only thing we’re worried about.

This tester is a four-year old and something of a juvenile delinquent. Like all the grizzlies at the Discovery Center, he’s a rescued problem bear – adept at breaking and entering.

Bear Expert: When they push on the side, it flexes. When they push on the doors, that could be where they get in. That’s not a typical bear movement, they push down not sideways. So far, so good. It’s holding up quite well, and we’re actually hoping in the back of our minds a little bit that they do break in to tell us where the weaknesses are.

Bear Expert: It’s all for the bears. Whatever we learn is gonna be for them and how to keep them out of the food, how to preserve ‘em, that’s the whole idea here.

This container passes the test and could save bears’ lives, sending them off to search for wild food.

Ranger Bob: The campers who were here today left, and left a mess of – it looks like carrots, rice, macaroni – this would be a bear magnet right here. Bears are quick learners. One of ‘em is going to get a meal and they’re gonna come back and if they start coming back, then the bear is in trouble. The bear will be, many times it’s going to be marked, it may be transported to the backcountry and if it comes back it’s the bear that gets destroyed and not the people that have done the damage. So we’ve got to remember that we’re in bear country. This is their land.

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