TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Fascinating look at the job Yellowstone’s bear management team does. Their job is both to protect the grizzly bear population from being wiped out, and to protect humans in the park from attack, too. Here’s an excerpt:

Finally they located the source of the delicious smell—a wheeled, 10-foot-long aluminum tunnel, open on one end, that had been deposited near the river just south of a campground. The mother bear stuck her snout in the tunnel and then climbed in toward the meat. It was roadkill, probably elk or bison. When she touched the bait, a trapdoor dropped behind her.

She spent a long, desperate evening in that trap. Her two cubs stayed close by, but she could only watch them and smell their scent through the ventilation holes at the front and back ends of the tube. At first she might have been agitated, clawing against the smooth metal insides of the trap. But as the hours slipped by, she may have settled into her prison, resigned to her fate.

I absolutely recommend reading it. We enjoy the wilderness because it is wild, and yet we try to prevent that very danger from ever hurting us.

(Via Richard Dunlop-Walters.)