Bear Size ~

[brotherbear]

Man Meets Grizzly by Young and Beyers.
This member of the great bear family continues to grow larger and stronger until he reaches maturity, in the seventh or eighth year. At that time he varies in size from four hundred to one thousand pounds. A grizzly bear at the Chicago zoo was weighed at 1,153 pounds. The biographer of James Capen Adams says that Adam's Old Sampson tipped the hayscales at 1,500 pounds. Many hunters have estimated grizzlies they have killed to weigh from one thousand to one ton; but a bear may look very large to a man out in the wilds.
Much has been written concerning the size of grizzlies. It was long a custom of mountaineers and hunters to speak of the size of bears in terms of the size of their tracks. Enos Mills gave the measurements of the largest grizzly track he had seen as slightly more than thirteen inches long and seven and a half inches wide. This length did not include the claws, which are sometimes seven inches long. Townsend's grizzly had a lateral footspan of ten inches and claws of seven inches. Than Galloway measured the foot of a Colorado grizzly at a little more than fourteen inches. Yet, tracks do not always indicate the size of a bear, any more than footprints do the size of a man.
There have in fact been many huge grizzlies. Than Galloway, the Utah bear hunter, reported killing one so large that it's skin, when stretched to dry, covered one end of a good-sized cabin. A bear is measured from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail; not that it would do much good to measure to the end of the tail, for this appendage is notoriously short. Despite the size of its tail, the grizzly is commonly a large bear, and many of the stories in this collection comment on its great size. An interesting footnote to the tale of Old Ephraim is that when his skull was presented to the Smithsonian Institution by the Boy Scouts of Cache Valley, the year following his death, the curator reported that it was the largest grizzly specimen they had had an opportunity to examine - a statement that the Smithsonian recently confirmed. Reply