A burglarizing black bear killed after breaking into a car for a sandwich at the Glen Alps trailhead, and increasing and fraught contacts between bears and people in the Anchorage bowl, prompts some outside-the-box thoughts of solutions.
There's that popular McNeil River bear webcam. What if we had a Denali Highway Garbage Bear and Wolf webcam? We're training our bears to eat trash, right? Pizza crusts are a lot easier to track and kill (and tastier — all that salt and sugar) than a whole moose or caribou, right? And the Alaska Board of Game allows and encourages hunting apex predators in border areas around Denali to boost moose and caribou populations for hunters, right?
So if the goal is to prevent bears and wolves from killing and eating little baby moose and caribou, why not line up trash cans the length of the highway from Anchorage to Fairbanks, fill them with everybody's garbage that they're putting out way too soon anyway so bears shop early and often? Lower platforms could serve the wolves. Then set up webcams and designate the whole highway corridor a world-class tourist corridor.
Bus tours, flyovers, international marketing — think of the possibilities.
True, the occasional selfie-taking tourist might get eaten, but some could well fall in the McNeil River every summer and perish too.
Wolves would live. Bears would live and waddle peacefully off to hibernation every winter. Moose and caribou numbers would soar. Tourists and hunters would be happy. What's not to like?
It would be simpler, of course, if everybody simply secured their trash until pickup, but it doesn't look as if that's going to happen.
— Cheryl Chapman
Anchorage
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