Well, we have the occassional cougar and wolf in Illinois, griz in Colorado doesn't seem that far fetched.

if he's there, he's not native, came in from the north

A spoted grizzly in Colorado? Could be.

We ran all the spoted grizzlies out of WY years ago and just kept the plain brown ones. Hard telling where all the spoted ones went.

Couldn't you have run them off to Canada? :)

It isn't all that much of a stretch since they live not too many hundred miles away. There are corridors of wild land where they coulkd pass through at will looking for food. A few miles south and they get a kill and then the next one comes a few miles from that in the south direction....and so on

They thought there were no more Griz in CO years ago until Ed Wiseman (Toneda Outfitters) found out differently.

The whole story got printed in Outdoor Life at the time. I'm thinking late 70s / early 80s if memory serves me.
I was just a kid at the time but I remember hearing about it.

Yes, there could be Griz in CO.

And your memory does serve you. It was 1979 - the year I moved from Colorado. Now, if my memory serves me, this was the guy who stabbed the bear with an arrow to kill it? But I also seem to recall that this bear was somewhere in SW Colorado? Somewhere east or southeast of Pagosa Springs, maybe?

Yeah, down in the San Juans somewhere. A long way for a Griz to travel from known Griz territory but it happened. I'm in the Bighorns, just a walk in the park from real Griz country and G&F says we don't have any here. The wolves have made it here. Maybe Griz will too.

I used to fish west of you up high quite a bit for cutthroat and grayling, haven't been up in a couple years though. Always wondered how long it would be before grizzlies moved in. I wonder whether G&F would admit to grizzlies being in your part of the country for fear of having to restrict things to do some pointless and expensive study to satisfy the environmentalists?

G&F did their best to keep it under their hats that wolves were showing up in the Bighorns but word got around as it always does. If anybody sighted a Griz around here it wouldn't stay a secret long. ( I exclude the excited tales told by goobers who see a brown phase black bear and tell everyone in town they've seen a grizzly in Johnson County. LOL )

Personally I wouldn't mind a few Griz around here, except for the good point you made about bureaucracies and their "studies". It would add some mystery to going back in after the rest of those elk quarters.