Huntsman, DWR look at updating bear policy

As this summer's unusually high number of bear encounters continues to grow, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said Wednesday he's taking another look at how the public can be informed about threatening animals.

U.S. Forest Service and Division of Wildlife Resources officials have closed two campgrounds in Utah and set traps for foraging bears — just days after Utah's first recorded fatal black bear attack. Samuel Evan Ives, 11, was killed in American Fork Canyon.

The Ledgefork campground above the Smith and Morehouse Reservoir in the eastern Uinta Mountains has been closed for three days as DWR officials have tried to catch an aggressive bear that has visited the site regularly over the past two weeks.

In the Spanish Fork ranger district Tuesday, DWR employees set a trap for a bear that has rummaged in a Dumpster.

According to Uinta National Forest spokeswoman Loyal Clark, the Blackhawk campground on the Mount Nebo loop will remain closed — with barricades — until the foraging bear is caught and relocated to another area. Closing a campground with a live bear trap is standard practice, Clark said.

The fact that the primitive camping area where Samuel and his family were sleeping Sunday night — and where the DWR had hunted an aggressive bear the previous day — was not closed has raised some questions about the policies that protect wilderness patrons.

Huntsman said because drought effects are pushing bears closer to humans, those rules may need to be changed.

"They went by the book, in terms of public notices, once they heard about the bear," Huntsman said of the state and federal authorities involved in tracking and killing the bear that attacked Samuel. "You probably have unprecedented movement by the bear population into campgrounds. Therefore, the books that we've used to guide our operations and responses in these things may be somewhat anachronistic. Maybe we need to update them."

Jim Karpowitz, director of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said he and other "key players" who responded to Sunday's attack were going through every page of their policy book, looking for areas to improve, when they heard of the governor's interest in possibly updating protocol.

"One thing about policy, you write policy based on everything you know from past experience with bears," Karpowitz said. "Our past experience with bears dictated that bears don't kill humans in Utah, and now we've found that bears do, so we feel that it is appropriate to review our policy."

A regional representative for the Forest Service in Utah said Wednesday that the federal agency may also change its policies as a result of the attack.