🕯️ LEGENDS GARDEN
🐻 Grizzly 399
Grizzly bear · Pilgrim Creek, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
Lives in Legends Garden
Bear 399 was radio-collared in 2001 by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team and carried their number for the rest of her life. She raised 18 cubs over 28 years, including a rare litter of four in 2020, and did it deliberately alongside park roads, where male bears that kill cubs rarely go. That choice made her the most photographed grizzly in the world and the subject of the 2024 PBS documentary Queen of the Tetons. She was killed by a car on 22 October 2024, 40 miles south of the park, at 28 years old and the oldest known reproducing female grizzly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
What they do
Walks the roadside verge with cubs strung out in single file behind her, halts, then rears up on her hind legs to full height to scan the road.
Raised her family on the shoulder of the highway because that was the safest street in town.
Lore
- ★She produced 18 cubs, more than any documented grizzly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and emerged from her den in May 2020 with quadruplets, one of only about eleven sets recorded there since 1973.
- ★Standing on her hind legs she was roughly seven feet tall and weighed close to 400 pounds.
- ★Her cremated remains were returned to Pilgrim Creek, the drainage where she spent most of her life, in November 2024.
Helping the real one
💛 Support Grizzly via Grand Teton National Park Foundation501(c)(3), EIN 83-0322668. Fetched and confirmed as a live donation page. The Foundation funds Grand Teton's Wildlife Brigade, the volunteer team that manages roadside bear jams, which the park created partly because of 399. This opens their own official page. Money never touches this site.
Where this comes from
- Grand Teton National Park (U.S. National Park Service) Grizzly Bear 399 fatally struck by vehicle in Snake River Canyon ↗
- U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Grizzly #399's remains returned to Grand Teton National Park ↗
- Wikipedia Grizzly 399 ↗
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