Montana man is violently attacked by bear near Yellowstone National Park

A bear mauled a Montana man causing him severe injuries near a campground just west of Yellowstone National Park.

The violent encounter happened Thursday afternoon in an area of timber near Bakers Hole Campground in the Custer Gallatin National Forest, three miles north of West Yellowstone Montana. The campground along the Madison River was closed for the season at the time.

The victim, a West Yellowstone resident, was able to call 911 following the mauling at about 3.45pm. He was located after an off-trail search of about 50 minutes and taken by toboggan and snowmobile to an ambulance before being transported the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls, according the sheriff’s office.

The violent encounter with the bear happened Thursday afternoon in an area of timber near Bakers Hole Campground in the Custer Gallatin National Forest

Investigators have been unable to interview the victim because of injuries that included significant scalp and facial wounds, according to Morgan Jacobsen with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office.

First responders saw the bear and described it as a grizzly bear, but that has not been confirmed, Jacobsen said. Black bears also inhabit the Yellowstone region but generally are not considered as aggressive as grizzlies.

An emergency closure was imposed on areas of national forest around the site of the mauling until investigators decide the area is safe to re-open.

Grizzly bears have been slowly expanding the turf where they roam in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains but need continued protections, according to government scientists who concluded that no other areas of the country would be suitable for reintroducing the fearsome predators.

An emergency closure was imposed on areas of national forest around the site of the mauling until investigators decide the area is safe to re-open

The Fish and Wildlife Service in March released its first assessment in almost a decade about the status of grizzly bears in the contiguous U.S. The bruins are shielded from hunting as a threatened species except in Alaska.

Grizzly populations grew over the past 10 years in two areas – the Yellowstone region of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, with more than 700 bears; and around Glacier National Park in Montana, which is home to more than 1,000 of the animals.

Grizzly numbers remain low in other parts of the Northern Rockies, and scientists said their focus is on bolstering those populations rather than reintroducing them elsewhere in the country.

Grizzly bears have been slowly expanding the turf where they roam in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains but need continued protections

The bears now occupy about 6 percent of their historical range in the contiguous U.S., up from 2 percent in 1975.

Conservationists and some university scientists have pushed to return bears to areas including Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and California’s Sierra Nevada.

An estimated 50,000 grizzlies once inhabited western North America from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains. Hunting, commercial trapping and habitat loss wiped out most by the early 1900s. The bears were last seen in California in the 1920s and the last known grizzly in Colorado was killed by an elk hunter in 1979.

Grizzly bears have been protected as a threatened species in the contiguous U.S. since 1975, allowing a slow recovery in a handful of areas. An estimated 1,900 live in the Northern Rockies of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington state.