10/15/2026
Shout out to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center! Great program, awesome facility, fantastic staff!
Having tested our containers here, we can say with confidence the testing process is legit! ?
At the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Montana, grizzly bears have jobs. Their job is to break things.
The center houses eight grizzlies. All of them are orphaned or conflict bears taken in by state wildlife agencies after encounters with people. They cannot be released. They grew up around human food, and a bear that has learned to associate people with food will do it again. In the wild, that ends with the bear being killed. At the center, it ends with the bear being handed a cooler full of fish and peanut butter and told to do its worst.
The testing program is run in partnership with the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, the federal body that certifies products as bear-resistant for use in national parks, national forests, and bear country across the West. Staff bait a cooler, trash can, backpacking canister, or dumpster with fish, dog biscuits, or peanut butter and honey, place it in the enclosure, and rotate bears in for a full 60 minutes of contact time. Licking does not count. The product passes only if no hole larger than a quarter inch appears, the latches still work, and the bear has not reached the food. If the bear gets in, the product fails and goes back to the manufacturer.
The bears approach the problem the way you would expect an animal with 600 pounds of body weight and claws the length of human fingers to approach it. They try the latch first. They mouth the edges, paw at the seams, and test every point where a lid meets a wall. If that does not work, they switch to force.
A 600-pound grizzly named Coram uses what the staff calls the CPR method: he stands over a trash can and pumps it with his front legs, over and over, until the lid pops loose. Others flip containers, stand on them, drag them across the enclosure, and bite through materials that passed laboratory stress tests without difficulty. Young bears start on coolers held shut with zip ties and work up to padlocks, commercial trash cans, and backpacking canisters as they gain experience.
When testing started, only about 10 percent of products passed. Manufacturers had designed for what they imagined a bear could do, and they had imagined wrong. The pass rate is now around 65 percent, which means the products got better because the bears kept showing the engineers where they were wrong. One company submitted a backpack made of Kevlar. The bears tore it open. The company came back with more Kevlar. The bears tore that open too. The company kept adding Kevlar until the bears could not get through. That backpack is now certified.
Randy Gravatt, the center’s facilities manager, has watched the program for over two decades. The staff tests roughly 100 products every summer, at about $500 per test. The results have real consequences beyond the backcountry. In Teton County, Wyoming, testing revealed that roughly 1,000 trash cans already sold and in use as bear-resistant did not meet the standard. They were not keeping bears out.
A bear that gets into a residential trash can in a town near Yellowstone learns the same lesson as a bear that gets into a cooler at a campsite: people have food, and the container it comes in is not a serious obstacle. A fed bear is a dead bear. The saying exists because it is true. A bear that feeds on human food reliably enough gets killed.
The center’s position on terminology is precise. Nothing is bear-proof. Everything is bear-resistant. Given enough time, Gravatt has said, he is not sure much would hold up. The test is 60 minutes. The certification means the product survived an hour with a grizzly. It does not mean the product would survive a night.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center / Randy Gravatt / Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee / CBS News / NPR / Cowboy State Daily / Backpacker Magazine / Yellowstone Park / IGBC.
