A 130-year-old cattle shed and a highway built 60 years ago, I-90, together help show why some of North America's most remote mountains can still be a dead end for grizzly bears, Live Science reported. In British Columbia's Lingenpolter Valley, a mid-19th-century gold rush left farms, a road, and a cattle shed in the only gentle pass connecting the Cabinets to the Purcells. Grizzlies can travel 4,000 miles in a year and typically roam 200 to 600 miles, said Michael Proctor, a research scientist at the Trans-border Grizzly Bear Project. They will not use the valley, he told Live Science, because of "a road and a 130-year-old cattle shed, which is rusting, but they don't like it. It's a wide-open area. For a bear, that's kind of like a shooting gallery."

That is a problem for the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, which aims to keep a 2,000-mile wildlife corridor from Yellowstone National Park to Canada's Yukon Territory. "The Lingenpolter is a critical linkage, so if we can get it working, then we can connect thousands of square miles of habitat," said conservationist and former MTV host J.P. Reeves, who now lives in the area. Wildlife biologists have proposed buying the decaying farm. Reeves hopes $1.1 million will persuade the federal government and nonprofits to purchase it as a private-public partnership. South of the border, I-90 is a 584-mile corridor from Washington to Montana. "Interstate 90 is what we call a hard barrier, it's just a big no-no for them," said wildlife scientist Adam Costello. Several bears have been injured or killed crossing it. Highways can also fragment populations and lead to inbreeding, Costello said. Grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem already number fewer than 50 animals.

Researchers are using GPS collars and movement models to understand why, where, and when bears move. "We're looking at how a bear sees the world," Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta told Live Science. Sarah Sells, assistant unit leader of the U.S. Geological Survey's Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, said tracking data recorded hourly can describe not only where bears go but why. "Bears are food finding machines," said Chris Servheen, a bear biologist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Bear Specialist Group. "So remembering where they found food is critical to their success in life." Derocher's work suggests that about two-thirds of the bears have a strong memory for where, and in what season, they previously found food. Wild bears generally avoid humans, but they have only a few months to fatten up for winter. If food is scarce, many go into human areas and sometimes get killed, Proctor said.

Tracking also shows that a lot of bear behavior is passed down from mothers. An infamous female grizzly known as 399 repeatedly crossed roads in Wyoming's Jackson Hole valley while keeping her distance from people. Her 20-odd cubs learned the habit but lacked her caution; several were killed by vehicles or management euthanizations. "It's a risky thing to teach your kids to do stuff like that," Servheen said. In 2023, a 27-year-old man hiking in Banff was killed after startling a mother and cubs at close range. Officials later said the cubs may have already learned to seek food on the trail. The models, sometimes described as "Sims for bears," are meant to help wildlife managers reopen corridors like Lingenpolter and I-90 before those lessons become another dead end.