| 1 | Fishing Bridge |
Located in Yellowstone’s mid-east, Fishing Bridge is one of the park’s most popular bear viewing sites. The bridge sits on the north-east shore of Yellowstone lake, shores which happen to be prime habitat for the bear’s delicious staple of cutthroat trout. During spring, it’s possible to witness dozens of grizzlies in action here at once, as April and May are the trout’s peak spawning times. With the bears comes the tourists, although to be fair, this is often against their will, as the bridge is notorious for bison jams and bear jams!
There’s enough grizzlies (and black bears) at Fishing Bridge that tents are now outlawed from the nearby RV Park, with only hard-sided campers being permitted. The bears are in control here, not the people. On March 9th 2019, Fishing Bridge was where the first newly awakened grizzly of the Yellowstone season was spotted.
The views are stellar at Fishing Bridge, with a pristine and sparkling lake stretching far off into the distance, bordered by luscious fir trees. The bridge lies just at the end of the main highway from Yellowstone’s east entrance, and there’s also a wooden tourist office, which is so rustic that it feels like a trained moose should be serving you. Originally, the bridge was a terrifying wooden thing that swayed in the wind, and was extremely popular with fishermen (fishing was banned here in 1972), but these days, it’s a hulking construction of steel that allows traffic to cross.
| 2 | Mount Washburn |
Yellowstone Park is home to an endless spaghetti maze of twisting, winding trails, but Mount Washburn is undoubtedly one of the highest and most bone chilling. It’s a 3000 metre high, 6 hour long hike with a constant blowing wind, and one of the last places in Yellowstone park where the snow melts each summer.
Making matters worse, it’s also a prime hotspot for grizzly bears. The grizzlies are drawn here for one simple reason: the endless supply of whitebark pine trees, a relic of the last ice age which only grows far above the usual treeline of Yellowstone. Every year, squirrels pick and bury the tree’s nuts in their thousands, before grizzlies arrive on the scene and use their supersonic sense of smell to greedily dig up the stashes. These nuts have a massive protein and fat content, and if it’s a productive season, then grizzlies prefer them even to berries.
This isn’t a route to be taken lightly: dogs are banned from Mount Washburn, and so is leaving the trail. Unlike Fishing Bridge, the grizzly bears peak here during fall, mainly because that’s also the peak of whitebark pine nuts. It would be oh-so-easy to mix up the dates in your head and stumble into the arms of a seemingly friendly grizzly. Yellowstone’s website states simply that “Hiking this trail is not recommended in September and October“. Paw prints are abundant on this high altitude route, as are trees which have ominously been stripped of their bark by grizzly bears with itchy backs.
| 3 | Old Faithful |
It’s said that Yellowstone park is the world’s most inevitable volcanic eruption, a 22 mile hotbed of pulsating tectonic activity whose eruption could fundamentally alter life on Earth as we know it. The problem is that nobody knows the exact date for this apocalypse, but one sneak preview you can see right now is Old Faithful, a geyser located in Central Yellowstone which sends a red hot plume of boiling water to the sky approximately every 80 minutes.
Tourists adore Old Faithful, and watch its eruptions with a keen eye from the wooden boardwalks, but it’s also popular among grizzly bears. Back in 2009, a grizzly bear was captured on video chasing a herd of bison right past Old Faithful itself.
In a photographer’s dream shot, the bear was framed to perfection with spouts of geyser water shooting up in the background, before continuing on past the wooden visitor’s centre. Had this occurred in high summer, the complex would have been packed with visitors, but it was merely April instead, with piles of melting snow lying all over the place.
August 2018 saw another incident, when a 10 year old boy was knocked to the ground by a spooked mother grizzly (whose life was spared) on the Divide trail just to the southeast. In June 2020, a 37 year old woman was knocked over and scratched by a bear on the nearby Fairy Falls trail, a winding path with no visibility. Old Faithful is a busy place with plenty of rangers, but the bears will always have the final word.
| 4 | Lamar Valley |
One of the true wildlife havens of Yellowstone Park, a place where you can witness brown bears, black bears, eagles, bison, elk and grey wolves prowling the plains in complete harmony. The Lamar valley begins at the northeast entrance of Yellowstone and is 29 miles long, with a well-paved road passing directly through the centre.
This is the only Yellowstone road to be open all year long, and drivers are encouraged to scan the rugged mountain slopes avidly for grizzly bears patrolling around. For Yellowstone’s authorities, this is the perfect safer option for less experienced bear watchers such as families with kids, and the slopes of Mount Norris and Specimen Ridge tend to be particularly packed with these brown or occasionally blond dots. There’s also multiple subroads leading to car parks where families can wait for friendly (or hungry) bears to come and say hello.
The Lamar Valley is a wide, meadowed valley with a raging river running through the middle, and wide meadows means large herds of bison. If you’ve always been obsessed with interspecies warfare (who hasn’t?), then the Lamar Valley is an unbeatable spot for seeing a grizzly trying to take down some prey, or wolves and grizzlies trying to displace each other from an irresistible bloody carcass. Ideally, this would all be happening to a soundtrack of the Lion King funnelled through a Yellowstone Park remix machine, but life isn’t perfect.
| 5 | Heart Lake |
One of the eerier, creepier bear hotspots of Yellowstone park. Heart Lake lies to the southwest of the more famous Yellowstone lake, and is much smaller, but also wilder and more secretive. This is a humid place of flies and mosquitoes where you could easily walk into the deceptive shallow waters and emerge with 20-25 leeches sucking on your legs.
Every year, Heart Lake is closed to public access from April 1st to June 1st, and the reason? You’ve got it – legions of hyper alert grizzly bears patrolling its shorelines. Heart Lake is a primetime fishing spot, a world renowned spot for mountain whitefish, cutthroat trout, and lake trout. Despite the restricted access due to bears, anglers with no fear are always eager to get their fishing rods into this lake, particularly given that lake trout was introduced illegally in the 1800s and there are no restrictions on catches.
The problem, or maybe the fun part, is that grizzly bears have the same idea. One incident happened back in 2017, when a 5 year old male bear was shot dead near Heart Lake after a 2 year rampage. In 2016, the bear had rummaged through the backpacks of unsuspecting campers and ransacked their tent, and the final straw came on August 27th 2017 when the bear stole and devoured a tourist group’s entire food stash. A backcountry pass is mandatory for visiting this bear hotspot, and bear spray is strongly recommended.
| 6 | Grizzly overlook |
For once, it’s not just a name – stand on this rocky viewing platform and if the time is right, you could see huge numbers of grizzly bears patrolling the plains before you. This popular tourist spot has a 20-25 space car park (which is in serious need of refurbishment), and is located in the Hayden valley of Yellowstone’s mid-east, a valley which runs just northwards of Yellowstone lake and Fishing Bridge.
The Hayden Valley is bisected by the Yellowstone river, with lush, flat meadows on either side where grizzlies can hunt for bison and which act as flood plains. The viewing point is surrounded by fir trees, but these have a perfect parting to allow a view of Hayden valley for approximately 10 miles into the distance, ending at the distant mountains. Armed with binoculars and patience, your chances of seeing a grizzly during spring and autumn are close to 100%, while bird lovers can watch geese, pelicans and swans gliding serenely down the Yellowstone river.
One bear incident happened in summer 2017, when a bull elk carcass washed up on the river shore just 100 yards from the nearby road. It had either been hunted, run over, or died of natural causes, and before long, several large bears were duelling over the carcass in plain sight of transfixed tourists.
| 7 | East entrance roads |
In Yellowstone park, the west entrance is typically the busiest among tourists, but it’s the east entrance which is a notorious hotbed of grizzly bears. The entrance itself is grizzly capital USA, and so is the long winding entrance highway that stretches for 27 miles towards Lake Yellowstone and Fishing Bridge. This is a classic highway for bear jams where all traffic grinds to a halt, where the eyes of a keen bear tourist should be glued to car windows at all times. The first section of the highway is flanked by the Swan Lake meadow flats, which are perfect for spring bears, while the middle section climbs the 2958 metre high Sylvan Pass, which is perfect for summer bears.
One famous resident is Raspberry the bear, born in 2008. Like sow 399 of Grand Teton, Raspberry has taken to raising her cubs by the roads to protect them from aggressive back country males, and consequently, she is unusually habituated to humans. In 2016, she gained new fans for her adorable bear cub Snow, who still roams the east entrance highway as an adult. Raspberry has also stuck to her traditional turf, and in 2020, she gave birth to a new cub called Jam.
Unfortunately, rangers are increasingly worried about this Yellowstone bear hotspot, as the Sylvan pass section is so winding and treacherous that it would only take one overeager driver to hurtle round a bend too fast and take out Raspberry or one of her friends forever.
| 8 | Pelican valley |
This bear hotspot has some of the tightest visitor rules in Yellowstone Park, for the sake of people’s safety. Night time trekking is permanently banned, and from April 1st to July 3rd, Pelican valley is closed to human beings entirely. Pet dogs are permanently banned.
The reason is simple – Pelican Valley is considered by wildlife biologists to be the most suitable piece of raw grizzly habitat in the entire USA. It’s located in the park’s east, directly northeast of Yellowstone Lake, and if you parachuted in, you’d probably be unable to tell whether it was the 2020s or the 1200s. It’s a windswept, moderately flat valley, running along the (unsurprisingly) bird-filled Pelican creek, with wooden bridges galore. Because it’s 1 mile wide and relatively treeless, your odds of seeing a grizzly bear walking the grassy slopes through your binoculars are extremely high.
One special feature of Pelican valley is Turbid lake, a misty blue lake surrounded by yellow pools of sulphur coming up straight from the Earth’s mantle. The lake’s shores are often littered with elk carcasses, and bones surrounded by giant grizzly paw prints, making it an awe-inspiring, yet slightly creepy place, like Yellowstone’s own elephant graveyard.
Despite the iron regulations, the death toll in Pelican valley is a surprising zero, but there’s a first time for everything.
| 9 | Tower-Roosevelt |
The so-called Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, a tourist spot renowned for its towering cliffs. This bear hotspot is named after the 132 foot Tower Creek Waterfall, a moderately wide, yet torrential plume of water which plunges straight into the rocky canyon below, a drop which you would have approximately a 1% chance of surviving. Before the fall, the river winds through a series of jagged volcanic spires. The earliest European explorers were amazed by Tower Falls, as were later gold prospectors, and a vivid painting by Thomas Moran in 1872 was partly behind the original decision to create Yellowstone park.
The nearby Roosevelt Lodge (created by President Teddy Roosevelt), café and campground complete the roster of attractions, but despite being comparatively more civilised compared to say, Pelican Valley, grizzlies are a constant presence here. Tower-Roosevelt is situated on the western fringes of the grizzly-packed Lamar Valley and they have no qualms about straying over for visits.
Tower Roosevelt isn’t an official Bear Management Area itself, but it’s surrounded by grizzly armies on all sides, with Mount Washburn BMA to the south and Blacktail BMA to the west. The popular Tower Falls overlook lies just 150 yards from the car park, and the winding path is an excellent bear viewing point, where the wide-open vistas become easily visible for a brief moment before the path curves back towards the rocky canyon. On March 15th 2017, the first newly awakened grizzly of the Yellowstone season was spotted just west of Tower-Roosevelt.
| 10 | Gneiss Creek |
A lusher, less mountainous bear hub, which wouldn’t be out of place in sleepy southern England or the old tales of Huckleberry Finn. This 13.9 mile trail lies in the northwesternmost reaches of Yellowstone park, just over the border in southeast Montana. The attraction for grizzlies here is simple – fish, fish, and more fish. Despite the name, Gneiss creek trail leads past numerous bodies of water such as Duck Creek, Campanula Creek, Gneiss creek itself, and Richard’s creek, all swimming with dense schools of trout.
The large brown trout species, for example, can grow to a tasty 4 feet, and is found abundantly in Duck Creek, while Gneiss creek specialises in rainbow trout. All this makes the Gneiss creek trail a fisherman’s paradise, but also a grizzly bear paradise. It’s perfectly normal for overenthusiastic tourists to hike towards Gneiss Creek, only to be stopped dead in their tracks by a “Trail Closed” sign planted just hours earlier due to a strong-smelling moose carcass.
The first 8 miles pass through the heart of the Gneiss Creek Bear Management Area (see this handy map), which is completely closed to tourists from March 10th to June 30th. From July 10th to November 10th, only on-trail access is permitted – unless you fancy getting a little too intimate with the local grizzlies. In winter, the area is also home to the 14 mile long Gneiss ski trail – watch out for bears awakening from hibernation. This is a windy bear hotspot, where the constantly battered trees sometimes grow sideways.
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