As of mid-2019, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are currently pursuing an end to federal protections for grizzly bears, while L!z Cheney (Republican, Wyoming’s sole representative in the House) is making headlines by insulting Indigenous peoples’ bear preservation efforts. After Wyoming attempted to remove grizzly protections, the outcome of the “Crow Indian Tribe et al. v. United States of America et al.” case reinstated some measures. Some of the plaintiffs: Northern Arapaho Elders Society; Crow Creek Sioux Tribe; Standing Rock Sioux Tribe; Pikani Nation, Hopi Nation Bear Clan; Crow Indian Tribe.

Referencing the case, Cheney, in mid-2019, said this: “The court-ordered relisting of the grizzly was not based on science or facts, but was rather the result of excessive litigation pursued by radical environmentalists intent on destroying our Western way of life.”

Technically, the grizzly’s US distribution is managed as 6 separate population segments, also referred to as recovery zones. In decreasing order of grizzly bear population strength, these areas are:

(1) Northern Continental Divide - about 800 to 1,000 bears  (Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, an extension of the crest of the Canadian Rockies, providing a contiguous corridor for Canadian grizzlies to enter the US)
(2) Greater Yellowstone ecosystem - 600 to 800 bears
(3) Selkirk Mountains - about 85 bears
(4) Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem - about 50 bears
(5) North Cascades region  - less than 20 bears

The crest of the Bitterroot Range and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is also technically considered a formal grizzly recovery zone, but management agencies and organizations formally say that there are no grizzlies currently residing here. This isn’t true, however: grizzlies do live or at least travel through in the Bitterroot Mountains. In October 2018, a grizzly was captured/relocated from a golf course near Stevensville, in the Bitterroot Valley. On 15 July 2019, a grizzly was tracked as it travelled through the Bitterroot Valley near Hamilton, eventually returning to the Lochsa-Selway region of central Idaho.

Here’s a map displaying how grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems wander extensively outside of the recovery zones, wilderness areas, and undeveloped land. (These regions, where bears wander, are displayed in the cross-hatched area, in this map from the US Forest Service.)

From the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee:

Here’s a look at current (2018) grizzly distribution in the Yellowstone region.

You can watch a neat and oddly satisfying animated map GIF of the past 30 years of Yellowstone-area grizzly bear range expansion : [x]

People familiar with the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) concept would recognize these habitat corridors in the Northern Rockies. There is contiguous forested mountain habitat from Alaska, Yukon, and northern British Columbia which extends along the Canadian Rockies crest and eastern BC’s Columbia Mountains, through Glacier and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, through northern Idaho’s cedar-hemlock forest, and to Yellowstone. The corridor also provides home to wolverine, fisher, mountain caribou, Rocky Mountain elk, moose, Canadian lynx, mountain lion, black bear, etc.

Some of those habitat corridors: