Zulu was a young bear, born three winters ago. Like many other bears, she hung around the Chilkoot corridor. Pictures show her intently scanning the water for salmon, a fluffy orange mane surrounding her long brown face.
Tom Ganner has spent much time at the Chilkoot, as a photography and nature guide, as a fisherman, and also as a camp host. He has watched Zulu since she was born. “The cub was a bear, and did what bears do, followed mom around, learned from mom, learned how to fish, and unfortunately along the way learned how to collect food from people who didn’t know to secure their food.”
Ganner was working at the campground when he first saw Zulu gain access to food from humans. “It became an issue last year, the bears as they walked up and down the river fishing, would chance upon visiting fishermen, anglers, who when they saw the bears approaching would move up on the road, bring their families with them, and would leave picnic material behind.”
The bears would find the food, and get a free lunch.
“And so I think this is really when those bears started to get food conditioned.” says Ganner. ” And the one we are referring to as Zulu was the more assertive and aggressive of the two cubs, the more adventurous if you will.”
This summer, park service employees kept linking Zulu to incidents around the Chilkoot. Jacques Turcotte started working as a ranger earlier this month. He says among other things, Zulu destroyed two tents: “Bear getting into people’s food, and pushing them off their picnic tables, grabbing coolers, knocking boats off a trailer, stuff like that. We received many photos and videos from the public of these various interactions, and talking to them, and having them describe the bear, it all came back to the same bear.”
Turcotte says the conversation that would seal Zulu’s fate began around the time he started on the job: “We started conversation with Fish and Game about two weeks ago now, of what to do with this bear and that is the conclusion that both us and the bear biologist came to would be the best course of action. With these young adolescent bears, it’s normal for them to push the boundaries, but once we started seeing more food conditioned bear behaviors, they crossed that threshold to where it became a danger to the public.”
For the sake of human safety, officials decided to kill Zulu. Last Saturday evening, at 8.40pm, Turcotte found Zulu in the berry bushes between the road and the Chilkoot river, near the parking lot. He says he tried to give her space, but that Zulu mock charged him, twice. Turcotte used his shotgun to shoot her in the chest. He says she died quickly.
No one we spoke to for this story blamed Zulu for the chain of events that led to her death. Everyone agrees that the fault rests entirely with the careless people who allowed Zulu to access their food. Part of the solution is securing the food. Turcotte says some containers are falsely sold as bear proof. “That’s a big thing, a lot of these companies market coolers as being bear proof, and they are not. In fact the cooler the bear got into was a “bear proof cooler”, and it was not.”
There are metal boxes at the Chilkoot campground where visitors can store their food safely.
Ganner, the ex camp host, says that trash disposal was an issue when he worked there. He says there is one large dumpster at the campground: “Just about every weekend, by the time Saturday or Sunday rolls along, that dumpster was full to capacity. And by the time Community Waste services would come and pick up the trash, by Monday morning, often you couldn’t close the lids.” Ganner says increased dumpster capacity could be part of the solution. But parc service officials say the campground’s trash cans and dumpster were not part of the problem this time around.
In the past, the Haines borough has paid people to monitor the area and urge visitors to act responsibly. Shannon Donahue worked as a bear monitor over ten years ago.
“I think it’s an amazing program, I would love to see it reinstated.”
Donahue is now the director of the Great Bear Foundation, an organization focused on bear conservation. She says there is one thing that would make the bear monitors more effective.
“I’d also say that the bear monitor needs to have the ability to write a ticket, or have back up from the ranger or law enforcement. That was a big issue for me. It would have helped me a lot if I’d had that ability. Barring that, it’s so important for the bear monitor to be supported by law enforcement.”
Everybody we talked to stressed the importance of enforcing existing rules. Two tour operators expressed frustration with visitors who that very morning were parked in areas reserved for commercial tours. And others were taking a rest in areas marked for bear passage.
The park service has only recently hired Turcotte as a ranger in Haines. The position had been open for years.
Turcotte is already getting busy around the Chilkoot: “Since I’ve gotten here, we’ve been doing very focused patrols in the campground multiple times a day.” he says,”We’ve been relocating unattended coolers and food to bear boxes, and educating people, giving out a few warnings, we gave out a citation to a person a bear had gotten food from them. Making sure that all the dumpsters and trash cans and everything was secure, and that nothing was readily available to this bear or any other bear in the area.”
All the people we talked to for this story welcomed Turcotte’s arrival.
