“The Flathead has been the heart of grizzly bear issues for the last 30 or 40 years,” Krueger said. “We’ve got a lot of expertise dealing with that.”

Rules and standards developed by Flathead Forest officials would then apply to bear management in the Lolo, Kootenai, and Helena-Lewis and Clark national forests too. An estimated 1,000 grizzlies inhabit the Rocky Mountains of Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and the surrounding national forest lands.

That drew the attention of Wilderness Watch executive director George Nickas, who warned that the new plan appeared to be abandoning long-standing practices from the previous plan for protecting bears.

“Their idea is to get the legal restrictions lifted and then they can open up to more resource use, logging and vehicle use,” Nickas said. “The risks to grizzly bears now are far worse than they were 25 years ago with climate change.”

Rep. Kerry White, R-Bozeman, was in Condon in September advising people on issues to raise in the comment period. He said several people would be asking the Forest Service to consider the needs of low-income people in the community, which he said had seen a significant increase in welfare spending since the 1970s.