In Brief: "Given that we were traveling with two top grizzly bear scientists, it's amazing that we did everything you're not supposed to do in grizzly bear country." Tim Preso, Earthjustice attorney in Montana, recounts a grizzly bear adventure in Yellowstone National Park.

It was a sunny May morning in Yellowstone National Park. Barely into my third month as an Earthjustice litigator in the Northern Rockies, I was taking a walk into Yellowstone's wild northeast corner as part of a media conference on grizzly bears.

Five of us -- two lawyers, two scientists, and a writer -- were climbing the steep southern slopes of a sagebrush-covered butte shortly after sun-up. Scientists Lance Craighead and Brian Horejsi are among the world's top grizzly bear experts. The writer was David Quammen, author of a number of natural history books and well-traveled enough to know his way around wild country. We lawyers figured we were in good hands.

We hadn't been out more than 15 minutes before committing our first grizzly country sin: hiking alone.

David strolled off by himself into a lodgepole pine thicket at the crest of the butte and jumped a young grizzly that was lounging there. Fortunately, the bear ran off across the top of the butte and was gone over a far rim before I made it up to the crest where Quammen was vividly describing his encounter. We gazed appreciatively at the big grizzly tracks in the damp spring earth. A nice story. Now we could take a pleasant walk across the top of the butte, then return to the conference and tell everybody that we had run into a bear.

A Yellowstone grizzly

Photo: NPS

The plateau at the top of the butte is a rolling landscape of sagebrush, grasses, and large boulders left behind by long-departed glaciers. We were all enjoying our stroll in this open landscape as the sun warmed the air, and we were caught up in our own thoughts.

Hence, we committed grizzly country sin number two: keeping silent.

A steady conversation or a good shout when approaching any blind spot will ward off most unpleasant bear encounters in grizzly country by letting the bears know you are coming. If a grizzly bear knows you are coming, it will almost always get out of the way.

We, however, were silent as we approached a small rise in the plateau. I noticed a glimmer off the waters of a small pond on the other side. I was just starting to move around the edge of the rise to see what birds might be stirring on the pond, when I happened to glance back at my companions. I saw Lance Craighead suddenly stop short. His eyes grew wide. He began motioning emphatically for us to back up.

"What is it?" Brian Horejsi whispered.

"Grizzly!" Lance replied.

We had backed up perhaps 30 yards when from behind the small rise emerged a large female grizzly bear and two yearling cubs. I am no bear scientist, but I knew this was a bad situation. Female grizzly bears are notoriously protective of their cubs, and we were far too close to any grizzly bear -- male or female. The cubs were both bawling nervously. One placed a paw on its mother's back and lifted itself onto its hind legs for a better view of us. The mother eyed us uneasily.

"Stay together!" Lance directed.

I had no other plans.

Well, I thought, a grizzly bear mauling -- this is a great beginning to my career as an Earthjustice lawyer. I could see the ironic headline in the local newspaper already: "Bear advocate meets grisly fate."

In truth, the fact that the bears were there at all was a tribute to the work of Earthjustice. Preservation of the grizzly bear is a fundamental goal of Earthjustice's Northern Rockies office. A series of Earthjustice lawsuits in the early 1990s succeeded in halting a U.S. Forest Service road construction and logging program that threatened to carve up the federal forests on Yellowstone's doorstep into habitat patches too small to sustain a grizzly population.

We are now reaping the fruits of that effort -- although still beset by numerous threats, the Yellowstone grizzly population has enjoyed substantial growth, and the great bears are now recolonizing some habitats where they have not been seen in decades. The continued presence of the grizzly on these lands tells us that Yellowstone is still wild and that we can still experience a true wilderness in the American West.

But part of loving wild places is accepting that they are not always safe or comfortable. Wilderness means golden sunsets, delicate wildflower blossoms, and trembling new-born fawns, but it can also mean an unexpected thunderstorm on an exposed ridge, a rain-swollen river blocking the trail, or -- in my case -- a short-range staredown with a mother grizzly guarding two cubs.

Fortunately our stand-off ended the way such encounters usually do in Yellowstone -- the humans bumble, but the bear makes the right decision.

As we watched nervously, one of the cubs decided it had had enough, and ran away from us down the slopes of the butte. The second cub soon followed, and finally the mother bear turned, gave us a quick backwards glance, and followed her cubs down the butte. Now we suddenly found our voices, and we excitedly reviewed the encounter and compared details that each of us had noticed.

While thrilling for me, I figured that such encounters must be routine for Lance, who has been around Yellowstone's grizzlies from the time he was a child, when his father and uncle performed the first scientific study of the great bears.

"How does that compare to other encounters you've had with female grizzlies?" I asked him.

"That," he said, "was the closest one."