Two Yellowstone hikers seriously injured in suspected grizzly bear attack

Two hikers in Yellowstone National Park were seriously injured in a bear attack earlier this week.

Yellowstone officials believe a female grizzly bear, with two or three cubs less than a year old, was involved.

The park is home to both black and grizzly bears, and the attack took place on a trail – Mystic Falls, near Old Faithful – that until 2024 had been closed to reduce the risk of conflicts with grizzly bears, according to the Wyo filea local non-profit media outlet.

The two injured hikers, ages 15 and 28, were discovered by another hiker and airlifted to a nearby hospital. One was in serious condition and the other in critical condition, according to another local media, the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

Hikers were the first people injured by bears in Yellowstone in 2026, the National Park Service » the service said in a press release.

In September 2025, a 29-year-old man was hiking alone on the remote Turbid Lake Trail when he apparently surprised a bear. While attempting to use his bear spray, he suffered “significant, but non-life-threatening, injuries to his chest and left arm,” according to officials.

The last fatal bear attack in Yellowstone was in 2015, park officials said, when an adult female grizzly bear accompanied by two cubs killed a lone hiker.

Grizzly bears, which can kill and eat large prey like elk and moose, often weigh twice as much as black bears, have larger claws and are considerably more aggressive.

Black bears are extremely common in California. But despite appearing on the state flag, wild grizzly bears have not been spotted in the state in about a century. The last known wild grizzly bear in California was shot in the 1920s.

Despite recent incidents, bear attacks in Yellowstone remain extremely rare. Since the park’s creation in 1872, bears have killed eight people, according to park statistics. For comparison, 125 visitors drowned and 23 died of burns after falling into the park’s boiling hot springs.

Even spotting a grizzly bear in the wild is still relatively unusual in the lower 48 states. Historians estimate that before the arrival of large numbers of European settlers, about 50,000 grizzly bears lived in the American West. Colonists viewed these massive predators as a serious threat to people and livestock and hunted them aggressively, reducing the population of the contiguous United States to fewer than 1,000 animals.

Conservation and recovery programs implemented over the past decades have helped the species recover. Today, federal wildlife officials estimate there are nearly 2,000 grizzly bears in the lower 48, concentrated primarily in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

Yet few things unsettle hikers more than the possibility of an encounter with a grizzly bear. For years, wildlife experts have advised people attacked by black bears to fight back, while recommending anyone confronted by a much larger grizzly bear to stay still and play dead.

The guidelines have changed slightly in recent years, but not dramatically. A National Park Service website advises: “If you surprise a grizzly bear/brown bear and it charges or attacks, do not fight back! Only fight back if the attack persists.”

In this case, officials advise: “Fight with everything you have!” »

In their press release after this week’s attack, park officials offered more advice, including: carry bear spray and know how to use it, hike in groups of three or more and never run away from a bear.

Oddly enough, staying home and watching Animal Planet wasn’t on the list.