Ten years ago, I envisioned a time in the future when Yosemite visitors would sit back in their chairs around the campfire and remember longingly how the bears used to walk into campsites to snatch food, just as some of today’s long-time visitors recall bears visiting the dumps (or, for really long-time visitors, the formal bear feeding shows). Like the bear feeding shows and the open dumps, some day, bears in campgrounds would be but a memory.
I no longer have this vision.
It all makes sense to me now why it is Yosemite Valley has such a persistent “bear problem.” It’s not really the bears. It’s not even so much the people. It’s the place.
Of course, Yosemite Valley isn’t the only area of Yosemite where bears get human food. We can get persistent problems in Wawona, Glacier Point, Crane Flat, Hetch Hetchy, White Wolf area, Tuolumne Meadows, and a few places in the wilderness. Yet, none of these places–not one of them–has a significant “bear problem” consistently from year to year. The only place in Yosemite that has persistent bear problems every year is Yosemite Valley.
So, what sets Yosemite Valley apart from all these other places? It is awesome bear habitat. It has lots of meadows (bears eat grass in spring), plenty of forest (and downed trees containing grubs), abundant berries, and large groves of oaks–especially black oaks (bears seem to prefer black oak acorns over the other oaks’ acorns). There’s also plenty of water. (And plenty of historic apple trees.) I don’t think you can find this combination and abundance of food sources, within such a small area, anywhere else in the park. Bears frequent Yosemite Valley because there is a lot of food there. Add people to the mix, and there’s even more food there. Add lots of people to the mix, and bears get plenty of experience being around people, which allows them to become habituated–that is, to become comfortable around people. A bear that’s comfortable around people is more likely to follow its nose into a campground and get human food, which causes the bear to become even more habituated as it tries even more to get human food, which often leads to the bear becoming aggressive.
Yosemite Valley is the main attraction in Yosemite National Park… not only for people, but also for bears, and the presence of people’s food makes it all that more attractive to bears.
We can improve food storage more and be more aggressive at scaring bears away, but there will always be a lot of bears in Yosemite Valley, and some of them inevitably will get into trouble, every year, forever.
Unless I’m wrong.
Tales from Yosemite - Jeffrey Trust's Blog 
June 30, 2011 at 2:48 am
I’m an interpretive ranger at the Forest Service’s Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area in Juneau, Alaska, and I’m very intrigued by this post because at the MGRA, we deal with essentially this same issue – our most intensely-used area is also great habitat for black bears. However, we deal with it quite differently than Yosemite.
About 20 years ago, site managers decided to simply ban food and drinks (other than water) from the primary grounds of the visitor center. The small size and day-use nature of the site make it reasonably possible to enact such a prohibition – nobody’s going to starve not having food for a couple hours.
The result is that our bear population has become human-habituated but not (so far as we know) human food-habituated. Bears routinely pass through our parking lots and trails en route to their feeding grounds. An elevated boardwalk trail was built a few years ago specifically to provide safe bear viewing opportunities in a nearby salmon-spawning stream, which has become a major additional attraction to the site.
The interesting thing is that, while we get plenty of minor grumbles and the most-requested item on our comment cards is a food concession… when I explain the rationale behind our policy (avoiding the problems seen at Yosemite and elsewhere), almost every visitor I’ve talked to “lights up” and understands where we’re coming from.
Of course, there’s really no way to shut this barn door elsewhere, nor would it be workable at most other places (can’t tell people not to eat in a campground…)