'Hell no to grizzlies': Darrington locals give federal agencies an earful

DARRINGTON — Andy Holland had been hiking near Meadow Mountain, about 20 miles east of Darrington in summer 1943, when he and his wife Dolly spotted a grizzly bear — one that several of his fellow rangers had told him campfire stories about.

In his memoir “Switchbacks,” the longtime U.S. Forest Service ranger recalled sprinting away at the sight: an alpha predator lunging in their direction. But when he learned hunters shot the animal that autumn, he still felt “an old friend had been killed.”

Holland’s account was one of the final documented sightings of grizzlies in Washington in the 1900s. But it isn’t listed in a typewritten record of encounters in the North Cascades, compiled in 1980, that shows the massive bears roamed the woods until just a few generations ago. The last confirmed sighting was in 1996, a testament to their extermination in even the most remote reaches of the Cascades.

Eighty years after Holland’s story, a public meeting Thursday in Darrington drew a packed house of locals almost unanimously opposed to the proposed reintroduction of grizzly bears in the region.

https://www.heraldnet.com/news/hell-no-to-grizzlies-darrington-locals-give-federal-agencies-an-earful/