It’s been a long haul getting grizzly bears reestablished in the Cabinet Mountains . . .
In the summer of 1993, biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured a 2-year-old female grizzly bear in British Columbia, along the North Fork Flathead River about 10 miles from the U.S.-Canada border, northwest of Glacier National Park.
Before loading the 80-pound sub-adult onto a truck and spiriting her 150 miles away to the Cabinet Mountains in northwest Montana, the crew assigned her an official designation — Bear 286.
Biologist Wayne Kasworm affectionately called her Irene.