BANNER PHOTO BY CONNOR STEFANISON |PHOTO ABOVE BY NICHOLAS SCAPILLATI | PHOTOS BELOW LEFT TO RIGHT BY: UNSPLASH IMAGES, NICHOLAS SCAPILLATI, COURTESY OF DOUG PEACOCK, NICHOLAS SCAPILLATI, CONNOR STEFANISON, NICHOLAS SCAPILLATI

“With a gnarled hand wrapped in bandages that he dressed himself after a recent fishing accident, Doug pours over maps, pointing out access routes, contours, lakes and mountain slopes.”

“He’s walking me through one of the wildest places on earth, a wilderness that saved his life… Yellowstone.”

“You are going to see ghost forests of dead white bark. They’re gone. They’re gone everywhere. The white bark are just gone and they’re never coming back.”

“I’m up on the top naked, and it's cold the wind is blowing…It’s October and those bears kept me up there for about 30, 40 minutes wandering around, once coming, here to the fence you know, 25 feet away.”

“….Those bears never looked at me, they were just enjoying my demise, you know, bleeding, blue and naked, you know like some species of sparrow, on top of the little tiny tree…”

“All of a sudden I hear this sound and it's the sound of nursing. She's nursing her cub maybe 15-20 feet away on the edge of this cliff and, you know I mean if that's not trust... yeah. The yearling cubs did try to come and check us out when the mother wasn't looking.”

“Right now we're fighting for wilderness in the heart of it.”

“I’m fighting for grizzlies but it could be any other animal including Homo Sapien, you know I'd be doing the same damn thing. Things have got to move. I'm not sure we got enough time to do all that but I'm not going to quit trying.”

(NICHOLAS SCAPILLATI, HOST, GRIZZCAST) From the Grizzly Bear Foundation, this is GrizzCast.

[intro chime]

I’m Nicholas Scapillati, the Executive Director of the Grizzly Bear Foundation. The Grizzly Bear Foundation is a charity solely dedicated to conserving the grizzly bear, through research and public education.

[sounds of car driving, acoustic song plays on the radio]

It’s the Summer of 2019 - last summer - and my wife Kas and I, along with our dog Sitka, went on a road trip from Vancouver, British Columbia to Yellowstone, Southern Montana…. It really felt like a pilgrimage, as we travelled to the world’s first national park.

[“Go With You” song by Mike Edel plays]

Kas and I crossed some of North America’s most endangered and majestic grizzly bear habitat, meeting those on the front lines of grizzly bear conservation along the way.

[music fades into gravel road sounds]

Now I’m driving up a winding gravel road on the east side of the Yellowstone River in Montana....

It’s the month of August and we’re heading to wildlife defender Doug Peacock’s home, nestled in some of the most famous grizzly bear country in the world - the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. 

[sounds of a rushing river and footsteps]

I walk up to the house and I’m ...“warmly”... welcomed by a doormat that says “Come back with a warrant.”

I take a quick - somewhat cautionary - glance around a relatively isolated area, catching a glimpse of an aluminum canoe that’s been used to explore the surrounding area of Yellowstone Park since the 1970’s. 

[door creaking/opening]

Doug Peacock.  

The grizzly man himself. Defender of wilderness. An environmental warrior. An absolute force of nature. A living hero.

[sounds of introductions]

What's the hardest part of your job?

(DOUG PEACOCK, GUEST) Just keeping up a fierce energy level to continue the fight and fought all my life. I get a little tired, I'm a geaser, I'm accident prone, balance sucks, I had a knee job that destroyed my balance, anyway I could whine on but that's enough.

(NICHOLAS) What's the most rewarding part of your job? 

(DOUG) To see hope and happiness in the faces of the people who are doing the good work of the earth.

(NICHOLAS) Doug is a humble, dedicated man. He is a fighter for the voiceless. He is a man committed to growth, wisdom, life.

[sound of laughter]

Kas and I are sitting in his living room, joined by his wife Andrea. Four people and three dogs, surrounded by stacks of books and natural afternoon light. 

With a gnarled hand wrapped in bandages that he dressed himself after a recent fishing accident, Doug pours over maps, pointing out access routes, contours, lakes and mountain slopes. 

He’s walking me through one of the wildest places on earth, a wilderness that saved his life… Yellowstone. 

[map crinkling]

(DOUG) Take the road to the tower… when you get to the tower, go over the pass… It’s alpine and it’s lovely. And there are bears up there! There’s still a little protein in the high grasses. And then you drop down the canyon where the falls are… at the edge of Hidden Valley… I spent maybe a year of my life there, illegally camping in the backcountry…

[music]

(NICHOLAS) Doug has traversed these remote lands for over 40 years….tracking, studying and living amongst grizzly bears. 

Long days in the sun have darkened Doug’s shaved head and added a glow to his cheeks, defying his 78 years of age. We are both rocking a bearded face and I feel pleasantly proud of the similarities, as I sit next to this maverick of a man and a personal inspiration of mine. 

(DOUG) I’ve paddled and gone down here… This is my route - Out here once by canoe… We bushwhacked out of here and went up to Two Ocean Plateau, which used to be a great grizz place...until the whitebark died. 

(NICHOLAS) Ecologists often say that a good year for whitebark pines means a good year for grizzly bears. It’s for this reason that Doug, naturalist and author, often speaks of whitebark pine cones, a favourite food of grizzly bears.

Considered a keystone species in subalpine ecosystems, this tree’s nuts provide a calorie-rich alpine food source for grizzlies. Like the Journey he is walking me through on his map, Doug recounts a memory of a large, lightning struck whitebark pine tree. Doug had watched a young grizzly bear dig deep beneath the towering tree to feed on the pine nut caches of industrious red squirrels. (Learn more about this story in his book, Grizzly Years).

But he has since witnessed the decline and death of thousands of these slow growing conifers, heavily impacting the grizzly bear population in the Yellowstone region as one of its major food sources disappear...

(DOUG) What you will see - and this is interesting - there’s still a few live whitebark trees...

(NICHOLAS) But really that few?

(DOUG) Ya, there’s very few surviving mature trees with cones… there happens to be a little pocket here but mainly you’re going to see ghost forests of dead white bark. They’ve knocked off probably 90% of them in 7 years from 2000 to 2007..

(NICHOLAS) …with climate change?

(DOUG) Winter temperatures rose a few degrees and allowed the bark beetle to over-winter up another life zone up into the white bark…. You need a couple, 2-3 days in a row, 30, below zero to kill that larva off. And it just kept happening and they’re gone. They’re gone everywhere. The white bark are just gone and they’re never coming back.

[music]

(NICHOLAS) The many threats facing grizzly bear populations on both sides of the border - in Canada and the United States - are one of the reasons why I am here today to speak with Doug.

It's really great pleasure to meet you.

(DOUG)  Well, thank you.

(NICHOLAS) Thank you for having us at your home and for all the great Work you've done for grizzlies. Looking forward to talking to you about it.

I first started working in conservation when I was 25 years old with legendary Canadian environmentalists - Jim Fulton and David Suzuki. It ignited an activist spirit in me, a fight. Decades earlier, around the same age that I was when I started in conservation, a 27 year-old Doug Peacock had returned home from a very different kind of fight - the Vietnam war. 

After returning home from his second tour as a green Beret medic, Doug went deep into the Yellowstone wilderness where his relationship with the great bear healed his spirit and helped him recover from his PTSD.

(DOUG) When I came back from Vietnam I couldn't be around people. So I went to live in the wilderness where I was comfortable, the Rocky Mountains and I, you know, I moved North with the snows and ended up in the Wind River range which is one of the great blank spots on a map… It's kind of tossed along a tumbling path only there were no forks in the trail.

(NICHOLAS) When Doug returned to the US, he sought refuge in one of those “great blank spots on a map”, finding solace in the company of grizzly bears. 

In today’s world, where the long-term survival of grizzly bears are at risk, Doug credits his own continued existence to the iconic predator. He is now a legend when it comes to grizzly bear conservation. …but even legends can have humble beginnings: 

(DOUG) ….the way I ran into grizzlies is, I had a malaria attack in the Wind River range and moved to Yellowstone which was easier terrain, better weather and I was soaking in the hot spring.

(NICHOLAS) That's nice that there's so many Hot Springs in this area.

(DOUG) Nice to regain some health, go to the hot springs spa, but it was sitting in the hotspring out of the corner of my eye, I mean I'd seen grizzlies tracks - I knew they were all over the place but…. I didn't really know shit about grizzlies. 

 (NICHOLAS) Had you seen one before?”

(DOUG) I had seen one in Alaska, you know, but it didn't take, the bear just reared on the tundra and ran away. But this is a mother of a couple years, I don't know anything other than you're not supposed to get close to mothers with cubs of any kind. So I decided I was gonna climb a tree, and the creeks only about that wide, but I'm soaking in there in the really hot water, its a hot boiling creek.

So when the bears weren't looking my way-- and never in this situation did the bears overtly look at me they knew I was there the whole goddamn time-- anyways I stood up, I was gonna climb the tree, and immediately I blacked out, you know the effect of hot water, but I was so terrified I grabbed this tree and I bashed my forehead into it, cut a huge gash in my forehead and blood dripping down and then I was still so terrified I got atop the tree.

But when I got to the top of the tree I discovered it wasn't much bigger than a Christmas tree --

[laughing]

--and I’m up on the top naked, and it's cold the wind is blowing, it’s October, and those bears kept me up there for about 30, 40 minutes wandering around, once coming, here to the fence you know, 25 feet away.

They never looked at me, they were just enjoying my demise, you know, bleeding, blue and naked, you know like some species of sparrow, on top of the little tiny tree. 

And that one took. I got it.

(NICHOLAS) It's interesting a couple times you've mentioned that they won't look directly at you….

(DOUG) Well they do but when they do, it's time to get out, it's time to leave.

(NICHOLAS) Fighting for nature is a lifelong commitment and right now we need fighters like Doug Peacock…

Doug is also a father, a husband, a friend, a grandfather… in his own words, he is a man who is out to tell the world how his life has been touched and forever changed by the enormous power and mystery of grizzly bears.

[sound of wind blowing]

(DOUG) A couple years ago my daughter and I were up on top of a butte in Yellowstone and the wind was raging and we're huddled behind a glacial erratic to get out of the wind, and I had my daughter right next to me and all of a sudden he had a look on her face and look again and you're here comes the mother grizzly only about 50 feet away with a yearling cub…

and my daughter….that was a tense experience.

I was like, “don't move,” and then the mother grizzly stood up, like once a bear stands up, they're not a threat to you, they're looking and smelling and thinking of getting out of there.

What she went through the whole thing - mouthings and slobbering - and it took three or four minutes and then and then the next time we saw as she's walking down within 30 feet of us right in front of us, paying no attention although the cub looked my way.

 (NICHOLAS) She knew she was there and thought ‘no I’m ok with”--

[music]

 (DOUG) She went to the edge of the cliff, which wasn't very far away, and there's a tree there.

All of a sudden, I hear this sound and it's the sound of nursing. She's nursing her cub maybe 15-20 feet away on the edge of this cliff and, you know I mean if that's not trust... yeah.

The yearling cubs did try to come and check us out when the mother wasn't looking.

 [chuckles]

(NICHOLAS) I love that story... and have experienced similar behaviour myself - bear cubs are very curious.

But before they can come out into the world, their mother bear will nurse them in her winter den until it’s time to emerge as the season’s change.

[music]

Sows (female grizzlies) have their cubs during hibernation after about 6-8 months of gestation. Cubs, most often twins or triplets, usually stay with their mother for two, sometimes three, years. As one of the slowest reproducing land mammals in North America (besides the musk ox), reproductive success often relies on environmental factors such as habitat and food availability.

 (DOUG) It's a matter of the amount of food available, you know. Grizzlies have a mutual antagonism and that breaks down in the presence of abundant food. In the natural world it's that starts with salmon kind of ends up with huckleberries but they do this everywhere, they did it in California, if you read the journals of the lost extinct Grizzlies in California they talked about seeing herds of Grizzlies you know out in the Great Valley, apparently digging for some kind of rodentia. They called them herds you know.

 (NICHOLAS) That's interesting because I only ever heard of them doing that when salmon are in abundance.

 (DOUG) No, it happened again even in Glacier (National Park) with show huckleberries, I spent almost 20 years with grizzlies up there and 15 of those years I was filming so I was out with them, you know.

Same place.. months in the same place every year and there's a place they congregated; gathered; concentrated - whatever word seems applicable - because there's so much berries you know they could be,

You'd see a mother and her cubs and you know a hundred yards away would be a couple sub-adults that was the last, the last of her litters. And I knew that, because I went to a year after year. I saw young bears grow up from 4 year olds, to 19 year olds and stuff like that it was really a great experience.

But once the resource breaks down and the frost kills the berries or the salmon run stops, everything changes. That's when you get a lot of antagonism.

(NICHOLAS) Deserving of both wariness and respect, humans have refused to tolerate these adaptable, intelligent creatures for centuries..

At one time, grizzly bears fished on the rugged West coast of California, roamed the sweeping Great Plains, and were found from Northern Alaska to Central Mexico. Today, grizzly bears have lost about half their historical home range in North America. They now occupy only 2% of their former range in the lower 48 states…In less than 200 years, we reduced grizzly bear populations in the continental United States, once numbering more than 50,000, now are down to less than 1,500 grizzly bears.

[music]

That’s the thing, I like working on grizzlies …. we need to open corridors and things to move and when we protect grizzlies a whole bunch of other species.

I've worked with Indigenous people throughout my career. I've been fortunate enough to have that experience and one of the great things about that experience is hearing myths and understanding that connection of different animals to the culture.

Is there something about working with grizzlies that kind of did that for you?

(DOUG) Well collectively yeah...one of the more astute comments in my first book was by an old Ranger up at Glaciers and he said, “this is as close as I have seen to an Aboriginal point of view.” You know, I live with them, I don’t go out to see them or film them, I go out to coexist.

If you obey a certain amount of good grizzly manners at all times and you're gonna be fine all the time.

I no longer surprise them and the only thing a mother grizzly cares about is the safety of her cubs, as long as you are not a threat you can get out of it. I mean I've been charged a couple dozen times, I've been charged 40 or 50 times with mother grizzlies, you know. All you do is don't present a threat. And it means you don't look straight at him, you don't move and you don’t scream. Make sure she perceives you as not a threat.

Right now we're fighting for wilderness in the heart of it because its excellent grizzly habitat and the people that are doing the real work and fighting for wilderness are getting a lot of slack from ATVs and mountain bikers; once you put a mountain bike in there, it's not wilderness anymore it's mechanized travelling 

I’m helping that fight; advocating for pure wilderness. Our kind of official wilderness is an approximation that's probably the closest we can get within our laws to what we really need to know, which is how it was a couple hundred years ago, when there were grizzlies all over.

 (NICHOLAS) “Fighting for wilderness in the heart of it.” Couldn’t have said it better myself… Doug’s story is one of many real-life examples of how the environment shapes our identity - where we’ve come from, who we are and who we will become. 

[music]

I was saying to my wife as we pulled in you know, Doug talks the way I want to talk publicly. I talked about that quietly and I go as an Executive Director of the Grizzly Bear Foundation and as an ambassador, but the things you say I say those too. You give me confidence to say those out loud I think, as you said about climate change there's little bit of time we've heard with wildlife (but not a lot of time) and biodiversity even less time but we need to start talking stronger with people and bringing them into this fight that we're in.

(DOUG) I mean the whole sense of urgency - this is just an example of what should be done. I’m not sure we are going to have enough time to complete it, but right now I think it’s the best thing to do.

I'm bleek about the future and I have children, I have a granddaughter now. I'm just going to fight to the end.

(NICHOLAS) Me too, I think that's what keeps me going. And I think we get to spend this time on this planet and if I get to fight for something that I love, what a great way to live.

When I met Doug for this interview, I wasn’t surprised when I felt right away that we were kindred spirits in one of the longest battles in history to protect one of North America’s most iconic species — the grizzly bear.  

(DOUG) I’m fighting for grizzlies but it could be any other animal including Homo Sapien, you know I'd be doing the same damn thing. Things have got to move. I'm not sure we got enough time to do all that but I'm not going to quit trying.

The human mind, our consciousness, was evolved in habitats whose remnants today we call wilderness.

Perfect happiness for me is living in a wild habitat with all the intact animals that were here thousand years ago, or in this part of the country you can say 250 years ago.

Doug says that grizzly bears saved his life. In return, he has devoted his life to saving the Yellowstone grizzlies and has gone on to help many other important conservation organizations get off the ground.

 (NICHOLAS) Thanks very much Doug, it's great to be here in your yard in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and it’s a real pleasure to meet you and spend time with you.

 (DOUG) Likewise man.

 (NICHOLAS) Thank you for listening to Episode 1, “Healing Power of Grizzlies”  in the new podcast series from the Grizzly Bear Foundation, GrizzCast.

[closing music]

I hope you have enjoyed kicking off our journey together with Doug Peacock, as we re-envision what it means to be a conservationist and stirring our imagination for how we can all make space for the wild in our lives. 

I’m Nicholas Scapillati, the Executive Producer and your host.

This episode was written and edited by our Producer, Lindsay Marie Stewart. 

Our Story Producer is Leia Hutchings. 

Interviews were recorded on location in Montana by Kas Shield.

ALO composed our theme music.

Original solo acoustic guitar by Jon den Boer.

This episode features the acoustic and original version of "Go With You" by singer-songwriter Mike Edel.

GrizzCast’s original album art is by Marie Wyatt, with graphic design by Lindsay Marie Stewart. 

To help us protect grizzlies - the lands they roam, the food they eat, and the wild we share, please make a donation today.

Tune into our next episode, “Legacy”, as I travel to the northern boundary of the Arctic Circle to meet with bear specialist and wildlife photographer Phil Timpany. A hunting guide turned conservationist, Phil is known as the “bear whisperer of North Yukon”.

This episode was sponsored by CBVA, learn more here.

Thank you to GBF’s volunteer Nik Coutinho for transcribing this interview.