Anchorage Daily News

Only slowly do the tracks of mountain bikes and people return to the muddy patches along Anchorage's Rover's Run trail after the rains now.

More than a month after a grizzly bear seriously mauled 15-year-old Petra Davis in Far North Bicentennial Park, people remain wary of the area along Campbell Creek on the eastern edge of Alaska's largest city.

"There's not many people using it,'' said bicyclist Janice Tower.

Little else has changed.

For years before the mauling, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists talked about the inevitability of such an attack; about how the human trails criss-crossing the park appeared designed to create confrontations between bears and people rather than minimize them; and about how little was done to warn urban dwellers that this area within a city of more than a quarter-million retains many attributes of a wilderness area.

Hand-printed warning signs stapled to trees and posts alert people to bears these days.

And Grant Hilderbrand, regional wildlife supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says his agency is still waiting for the area land managers -- the Municipality of Anchorage and the Bureau of Land Management -- to seek advice on making the area safer.

But no one has asked.

"It's a big public policy issue, but there's no entity now that is going to bring that all together," said Tower. "It's a city problem. Well, yes, but no. It's a state wildlife problem, but Fish and Game will say, 'That's a law enforcement problem.'

"I hear a tremendous amount of frustration."

BUSY BEAR SUMMER

From Girdwood to Eagle River, Anchorage has grappled with bear problems all summer.

Area wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott said he has had nearly a dozen reports of mountain bikers, runners or hikers chased by a grizzly sow with cubs in the Hillside/Bicentennial parks area since Davis was attacked. Another sow with cubs has confronted people along the Eagle River greenbelt near Eagle River High. And earlier this week a sow with a cub or cubs killed a moose calf off Riverside Drive.

Sinnott and assistant Jessy Coltrane were called in to remove the dead calf from a subdivision built in a bear travel corridor on the bluffs above Eagle River. Biologists say problems with bears there were predictable, and there are few problems bigger than a moose kill.

Longtime residents will recall that a grizzly on a kill attacked 77-year-old Marcie Trent, her 45-year-old son Larry Waldron, and her 14-year-old grandson Art Abel as they made their way along the McHugh Creek Trail 13 years ago. Trent and Waldron died. Abel barely escaped.

The attack was the deadliest in Anchorage history. Over the years that followed, there would be many more bear-human confrontations. Despite some minor injuries, most would end with people scared and, sometimes, a bear shot dead.

Then came Davis.

Some have questioned her participation in a 24-hour mountain bike race near Campbell Creek when the salmon and bears were starting to arrive, though it's not clear yet what happened to her in the dark. Sinnott believes she might well have collided with a bear, precipitating the attack.

Critics say municipal park officials forced the race onto a trail within yards of Campbell Creek by denying the use of a trail well back from the creek. Officials said they were worried about erosion.

Nobody seemed too worried about bears, though Fish and Game research biologist Sean Farley has for years been saying that the area along Campbell Creek is thick with them.

Dozens of grizzlies use the area, but despite Farley's warnings, little has changed.

Nothing has been done to make Bicentennial Park trails safer. Little thought has gone into separating bears and people as Anchorage development continues to creep into the Front Range of the Chugach Mountains.

Eagle River subdivisions continue to invade bear travel corridors. Sinnott and Coltrane are trying to prevent Eagle River residents from building trails in and along an Eagle River greenbelt used by bears. New Hillside homeowners buy properties only to move in and discover that bears regularly traipse through their yard.

"Nobody (cares)," said Keith Tryck, a lifelong area resident who has for years been trying to get the city to write a municipal bear plan that would reduce conflicts and warn people who move into bear habitat.

"Something has to happen,'' he said. "It's not right for kids to get injured."

4-YEAR-OLD PLAN

Four years ago, the Anchorage Bear Committee organized by Fish and Game came up with a plan.

"Guidelines for Maintaining Bear Habitat While Reducing Bear-Human Conflicts in the Municipality of Anchorage and Chugach State Park" suggested:

• Zoning standards barring development in areas heavily used by bears;

• Changes in road and trail design to minimize bear-human encounters, and

• Restrictions on everything from garbage disposal to bird feeders in an effort to keep bears from human-produced food.

"If you remove their feed," Tryck noted, "the bears will go away."

Food, Farley said, is why bears congregate along Campbell Creek. They come for the king, silver and red salmon that run up the creek into Bicentennial Park, he said.

Hilderbrand knows this situation well. Before he became the regional wildlife supervisor, he studied bears and salmon.

And the bears cannot help but be drawn to the bounty of salmon in Anchorage creeks, he said. They need food to survive the winter.

So why are so many bear-attracting salmon allowed up Anchorage streams? he wonders.

State fisheries biologists are charged with maintaining large and healthy salmon runs, area fisheries biologist Dan Bosch notes, with a long tradition of managing for the maximum sustained yield.

A major change in approach would be needed if fishery biologists began managing Anchorage streams for the fewest fish needed to maintain the genetic diversity of local salmon stocks. But such a change would sharply reduce the bears' food supply.

"It's all about policy-value arguments,'' said John Hechtel, a respected bear biologist now retired from Fish and Game. "Nobody ever agrees on how many bears are enough, or how many salmon is a right number."

Like Hilderbrand, Tryck, Farley and Sinnott, Hechtel believes much could be done to minimize bear-human conflicts in Anchorage, but someone must lead the effort.

"This is nothing new," Hechtel said. "People have been struggling with this for years. There are ways you can try to optimize the situation."

Many of those ways are familiar:

• Minimize food attractants -- whether it's spawning salmon, salmon carcasses, moose calves, garbage, livestock, bird and dog food, beehives.

• Move trails away from salmon streams.

• Widen and open trails so bears and people have a greater chance of seeing and avoiding each other.

NOT SO SIMPLE

Simple as these things sound, they can quickly turn complicated.

When the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage widened and opened ski trails on the Hillside a few years ago -- mainly to make things better for skate skiing in the winter -- there were howls of protest that they were destroying Anchorage parks.

A mountain-biking group, Singletrack Advocates, recently formed to fight trail widening. The group lobbies for narrow, technical trails that are fun to ride. Farley said there is nothing wrong with such trails, only sometimes with where they are built.

Narrow, winding trails along salmon streams maximize the odds of surprise encounters, especially if bikers are flying along at high speeds, Sinnott said.

The problem is not unique to Anchorage. The Whistler ski area in British Columbia, which heavily promotes downhill mountain-biking, used to have a problem with people colliding with bears feeding in berry patches.

Those were black bears, which are generally conditioned to flee a collision. Grizzly bears -- bigger, stronger and usually more aggressive -- are more likely to attack.

Because of that, some want to simply get rid of Bicentennial Park grizzly bears. Shoot them and be done with the problem.

"But you can't just shoot the bears, because more bears will just move in," Tower said. "You've got to look at it as an ecosystem."

"The real source of the bears is the (Chugach) State Park," said municipal parks director Jeff Dillon. "The bears don't know geopolitical boundaries.''

The bears really know only one thing, that they must get enough food to fatten up before fall or they won't survive hibernation. Reduce the food -- salmon, moose, garbage -- available to them and you reduce the number of bears.

"Garbage is 85 percent of the problem," Farley said.

Fish and Game's Elizabeth Manning has gone door-to-door in some neighborhoods talking to people about the issue. Teaching residents that accessible garbage lures bears is tough, she said.

CUBS SEEKING FOOD

Farley counted at least 15 cubs accompanying sows he studied in Bicentennial Park three years ago. Those cubs were learning to come to Campbell Creek for food.

Some of them, accustomed to being around people, might move closer to town if plans to expand salmon runs in Chester and Ship creeks move forward.

Farley has lobbied against new or bigger salmon runs in those streams, but Anchorage residents love their salmon. Efforts continue to restore runs in Chester Creek and remove dams on Ship Creek to make a large, new stretch of spawning habitat available.

"It's a big, wild goat rope,'' Farley said.

Tobish, who represents the municipality on the bear committee, concedes there should be a better public airing of these issues.

"We're kind of behind," he said. "I know the committee has talked about coming up with a bear plan, the way we came up with a goose (reduction) plan. (But) who's the agency responsible for the bears?"

Fish and Game is charged with maintaining healthy wildlife populations, generally by protecting them. Where it has tried to use gunners to regulate abundant wildlife -- be it moose on the Hillside or wolves in the Interior -- strong objections have followed.

"Unfortunately,'' Tower said, "there's a wildlife contingent that really values animals above people."

She thinks the two should be on a more equal footing.

John McCleary, special projects director for Anchorage parks, and Dillon aren't so sure. They point to a 1997 public survey in which most residents said they liked having a lot of moose, bears and other big wildlife in and around the city.

Twenty-two percent of Anchorage residents reported seeing a bear in their neighborhood; 70 percent, meanwhile, thought the number of black and grizzly bears in the area was either about right or too few.

Dillon doubts public opinion has shifted much. He notes the 1997 survey came only a couple years after a bear killed Trent and Waldron.

"I hike there (in Bicentennial Park) every night,'' he said. "I do know there is some risk in going out there. I hiked with some trepidation after the (Davis) incident" but eventually got over that.

"We've known about the bear population ... for a long time," he said. "I feel pretty safe on the larger trails.

"We're a society that wants to know about risks. We accept certain risks, but risk is an individual issue."

What might scare some won't bother others. Dillon's wife is uncomfortable wandering around in Bicentennial Park; he is not. He accidentally walked within 10 feet of a grizzly just last year, he said.

"My heart jumped a bit,'' he said, "but I've worked at Katmai" National Park and Preserve, where bears are numerous.

Dillon backed away from the Bicentennial bear, and all was fine.

COMMUNITY DISCUSSION

"That's fine for you and me," said Tryck. "But what about all the people who don't know about bears?"

Who tells them how to avoid danger, or what to do if they run into a bear? Who warns them the home they're considering sits in the middle of prime bear habitat?

"We have been having internal discussions on that,'' Dillon said. "But we've been doing that for years. It's an ongoing process."

But he doesn't know who should be in charge of making changes.

"I can't tell you who leads. I don't think there is a single leader."

Tryck hears this sort of thing and just shakes his head.

"There's the problem,'' he said.

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Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com or 257-4588.<

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