Famous grizzlies of Montana
Scarface
Scarface, or No. 211 as researchers called him, was a 25-year-old icon in Yellowstone National Park. His nickname, which came from extensive scarring on the right side of his head, was well known in Yellowstone by biologists and photographers.
First collared after being captured when he was 3, he was recaptured 16 times. In his prime, he weighed about 600 pounds, about as big as they get in Yellowstone, according to Kerry Gunther, bear management biologist in Yellowstone.
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He was shot and killed in late November 2015 north of Gardiner. The incident is still under investigation.
Most grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem die at an average age of 11. When last captured in 2015, the aging Scarface weighed in at only 338. Fewer than 5 percent of male bears born in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem survive to 25 years.
Loma bear
The Loma Bear reminded 21st Century Montanans that grizzlies once occupied the state’s prairies.
On June 30, 2009, the grizzly that traveled 177 miles, as the Teton River flows, from the Rocky Mountain Front to Loma, was captured on a Marias River farm, a mile and a half from the Missouri River, where explorers Lewis and Clark chronicled run-ins with fearsome prairie bears as they passed through in the early 1800s.
It was the first time that Montana bear managers had seen a bear that far east of the Rocky Mount Front.
The bear was relocated to the Flathead National Forest, west of the Continental Divide, but the Loma Bear, as it became known, preferred the plains.
In August 2009, a biologist picked up a signal from the bear’s radio collar. The bear had crossed the Divide, coming out of the mountains near East Glacier. The bear was northeast of Browning, in open grassland, and headed toward Alberta.
That’s the last time authorities knew where the bear was until it showed up again in Chouteau County on July 12, 2010. When it was trapped, the radio collar was no longer on its neck.
The bear was euthanized after it killed chickens, the second time it had fed on domestic animals.
Gertie the Grizzly
One of the best-remembered and most photographed bears in Glacier history was Gertie, a honey-colored grizzly that used to beg morsels from tourists below the Garden Wall on Going-to-the Sun Road during the 1940s. She learned to sit on her haunches and beg, as traffic passed on either side. Gertie was the epitome of the cute bum bear, a Yogi prototype, and her photo appeared in many publications, including National Geographic. When Gertie had cubs, she would bring them along and they quickly learned the benefits of the mooching routine. Gertie’s begging days came to an end in 1949 after several minor biting and scratching incidents. Despite being the photogenic host of the park, she was trapped and moved, returning once before being trapped and moved again — never to return.
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Lincoln bear
The Lincoln Ranger District is home to the mount of one of Montana’s most famous grizzlies, which at 12 years old was struck and killed by a truck in October of 2007.
The grizzly weighed 830 pounds — among the biggest bears ever documented in the continental United States. That’s about 250 pounds heavier than the average adult male grizzly in the lower 48.
The bear began its life east of the Divide, on the Rocky Mountain Front near Choteau. It traveled the Blackfoot River Valley, including the Lincoln area, since at least 2004.
The bear was hit by a vehicle once before the fatal collision, and also survived being shot.
Geifer Creek bear
The Geifer Creek grizzly is one of Montana’s most mischievous grizzlies. From 1975 to 1977, the bear damaged dozens of homes and cabins in the Middle Fork and North Fork of the Flathead.
On hot pursuit by wildlife officials armed with snares, steel traps, tranquilizer guns and scoped rifles, they would always arrive too late to the scene of the crime — only to find a window or door pushed in and a huge mess in the cabin.
He was eventually killed by a hunter in Canada.
Ethyl
She was quite the sightseer in her older years.
Ethyl, a 20-year-old sow, logged 2,800 miles in fewer than three years, crossing interstate highways, and major city boundaries, including residential backyards — and never got into any trouble with humans.
In her early years, Ethyl hung around Lake Blaine, between Bigfork and the Swan Mountains. After her first capture in 2006, she was relocated but returned in 2012 to the same apple orchard that got her in trouble once before. She was recollared and relocated to a more remote drainage.
That’s when she got wanderlust – and never got in trouble again.
She discovered the Bob Marshall Wilderness and took a few hikes on the Rocky Mountain Front between Lincoln and Augusta. She checked out the Mission Mountains and the Jocko Lakes area.
She then headed to Idaho along the Interstate 90 corridor, passing Arlee as she traveled. She moved north of Wallace, Idaho, past Kellogg and made it nearly to Coeur d’Alene before apparently denning somewhere in the Panhandle.
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By April 2014, she was back in Montana along I-90, past Superior and headed right for Missoula where she turned south through the Blue Mountain Recreation Area on her way to Lolo (where she walked right through the town) and eventually Florence.
She headed to Coeur d’Alene again, then back to Missoula en route to the Bob, right past her old stomping grounds at Lake Blaine. She checked out the sites in Glacier National Park before moving west toward Eureka, where she lost her collar on Oct. 17, 2013.
Other notables
•Two Toes roamed Swan Valley in the 1890s killing a small fortune in livestock before being hunted down.
• Around 1900, Old Terror the pig killer lived in the the Cabinet Mountains. Hunters reported firing 40 shots at the grizzly at close range. Newspaper reports said the bear survived because of its “supernatural toughness.”
•The Falls Creek male became a legendary cattle killer in the late 1980s and 1990s, credited with about one cow, yearling or calf killed a year. Biologists maintain that the grizzly didn’t kill nearly as much livestock as reported, but did add to its notoriety by eluding capture until 2001.
Sources: Great Falls Tribune archives, “Waterton and Glacier in a Snap!: Fast Facts and Titillating Trivia” by Ray Djuff and Chris Morrison, The Missoulian archives, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and ”Great Montana Bear Stories by Ben Long.