Rockies

Rocky Mountain National Park and the U.S. Wildland Fire Service plan to burn about 437 acres on the park's east side, between the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center and Bear Lake Road and south of High Drive, when weather and fuel conditions allow, possibly starting late October. Burning will be spread over several days to limit smoke, which may be visible in Estes Park. The park says earlier fuel treatments helped keep the 2020 East Troublesome Fire and 2012 Fern Lake Fire from crossing Bear Lake Road and Trail Ridge Road; check the park's alerts before driving Bear Lake Road during the burn.

Yellowstone National Park closes its West, South and East entrances and nearly all park roads to regular vehicle traffic on November 1, the park said October 21. Saturday, October 31, is the last day visitors can drive most of Yellowstone's roads in 2026. The road from Tower Fall to Canyon Junction over Dunraven Pass stays open through October 31, weather permitting.

Through the winter, the only route open to cars is the road between the North Entrance at Gardiner, Montana, and the Northeast Entrance at Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, through Mammoth Hot Springs, Tower Junction and Lamar Valley. It stays open year-round, weather permitting. Snowmobile and snowcoach travel season starts December 15.

Glacier National Park has confirmed white-nose syndrome in a dead little brown bat found in the Saint Mary area in May, and the fungus that causes it in several live bats sampled on the east side in June, the park said October 21. They are the first detections in the park and in Glacier County.

The disease infects bats while they hibernate, making them wake repeatedly and burn through fat reserves, often leading to starvation and death. Since it was found in New York in 2006 it has spread across North America. Glacier has 10 documented bat species, all insect-eaters that are also prey for raptors and weasels.

Two dead snowshoe hares found in Glacier National Park's Many Glacier Valley have tested positive for tularemia, a rare but serious bacterial disease, the park said October 15. One was found September 26 in the Park Service staff housing area at Many Glacier, and the other September 30 along the trail to the Swiftcurrent Falls viewing area.

Tularemia occurs naturally and is most often spread by bites from infected ticks or flies. People and pets can also catch it from handling infected animals, from contaminated food or water, or by breathing bacteria released from disturbed carcasses. Person-to-person spread is rare.

Glacier National Park closes the alpine section of Going-to-the-Sun Road at 7 p.m. tonight, from Avalanche to the Jackson Glacier Overlook, ahead of a storm forecast to bring rain, possible snow and gusting wind to the high country through Sunday, October 11. The park says the closed stretch may change as needed and will reopen when conditions improve.

That cuts off Logan Pass from both sides for the weekend. For road status by text, send GNPROADS to 333111.

Montana's pheasant season opens Saturday, October 10. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks plans to release more than 15,000 pheasants across the state this fall, including more than 3,500 this week, under its Roosters for Recruitment program, now in its sixth year. The program is aimed at giving new hunters a better chance of success.

Nonresident upland bird hunters who plan to hunt public land, or private land enrolled in FWP's access programs such as Block Management, have to wait until October 20 for most upland species.

Montana's fall is underway. Mountain grouse, partridge, sharp-tailed grouse and turkey opened at the start of the month. Archery hunters could pursue elk, deer, black bears, wolves and mountain lions from September 5, and holders of drawn bighorn, moose and goat permits started the same day.

General firearms dates stagger by species. Black bears and wolves came open on September 15. The youth deer hunt runs October 15 and 16. General deer and elk open October 24 and run to November 29, with district-specific shoulder seasons stretching as wide as August 15 to February 15 where the agency has opened them.

Chronic wasting disease keeps rewriting the fine print. Colorado now requires heads from every elk taken during rifle seasons in selected hunt codes, at no charge, and has dropped mandatory deer testing entirely for 2026. Hunters who want a deer tested anyway can submit voluntarily for $25.

Idaho requires testing for deer in seven units, adding 64 and 69 near Idaho Falls while removing 24 and 32A after two consecutive years with no detections. Units 14 and 18 and part of Unit 1 remain management zones, where testing is mandatory and whole carcasses may not leave the zone at all.

A cool end to August across western Montana dropped water temperatures below the threshold, and Fish, Wildlife and Parks has lifted or eased restrictions on a long list of rivers with more cool weather and precipitation forecast.

Silver Bow Creek is open in its entirety. So is the Bitterroot from Veterans Bridge at Hamilton down to the Clark Fork confluence, though the upper river restriction stands. The Clark Fork is open from its origin to the mouth of the Blackfoot, and restrictions came off the lower Beaverhead, the East Gallatin, the lower Gallatin, the Ruby and the Smith.

Overland Expo Mountain West ran August 21 to 23 at The Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, and pulled around 18,500 people past more than 300 exhibitors. Organisers reckon it may have set a record for the number of new products, rigs and vehicle platforms debuting at a single event in the series.

On the camper side, Supertramp debuted the Paragon for the F-350 platform, VanCraft showed the Strata with a flexible layout, and Four Wheel Campers had the new Outpost 8.0, the larger sibling of the 6.5 that showed up earlier in the summer.

Nineteen bodies of water across Montana were under hoot-owl restriction as of this week, limiting fishing to the hours between midnight and 2 p.m. At the same point last year the figure was sixteen.

The comparison officials keep reaching for is 2024, one of the most restrictive seasons the state has recorded. Below-normal snowpack going into the summer and hotter-than-normal temperatures through it are the two drivers, and neither is the sort of thing that turns around inside a week.

The short answer to the question everyone asks first is no: the July proposal does not open a grizzly hunt, and will not soon. The bears stay federally threatened. What moves is who handles day-to-day management of roughly 2,000 animals across Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington.

About half of those bears live in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, where populations have met recovery targets on most biological measures. That is the basis on which three states have pressed for delisting for a decade, and the basis on which two previous delistings were overturned in court.

Daytime highs in the nineties with nights barely dropping to sixty have pushed western Montana rivers past the line. Hoot-owl restrictions now cover the Clark Fork in its entirety, the Bitterroot and East Fork Bitterroot, and the Blackfoot from Cedar Meadow down to the Clark Fork confluence.

There is a separate set of restrictions aimed specifically at bull trout, covering hundred-yard radiuses around the mouths of Rattlesnake Creek, Fish Creek and the St. Regis. Bull trout and westslope cutthroat stack up where cold tributaries enter the main river, which is exactly where an angler would look for them and exactly where they can least afford the handling.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks closed the Madison from Madison Dam to the footbridge at the NorthWestern Energy powerhouse to all fishing from Wednesday. Warm water leaving Ennis reservoir is preventing the stretch from cooling off overnight, and officials say sustained high temperatures are lethal to native fish.

Six more rivers went under hoot-owl restriction the same week, which closes fishing between 2 p.m. and midnight. Two sections of the Big Hole are affected, along with the lower Gallatin from Cameron Bridge Road down to the Missouri, and stretches of the Jefferson, Beaverhead, Smith and Sun.

The Interior Department announced a proposed rule on July 14 that would move day-to-day grizzly management to the four states where the bears live, while leaving them listed as threatened. The department framed it as recognition of recovery rather than a delisting, and the Secretary was explicit that responsibility, not status, is what moves.

The mechanism is a tiered system. How much decision-making and regulatory flexibility a state gets is tied to whether it has adopted conservation strategies and management plans and hit demographic objectives for the bears in its own country. Meet more of them, get more latitude.