JACKSON — Before early May, the last time Mike Cottingham had seen a grizzly bear in the Aspens was a decade ago.

The bear had been making its way onto his deck. Surprised, and thinking the bruin was a black bear, the 45-year resident of the West Bank subdivision chased it off the porch. Only later, after seeing a neighbor’s pictures, did he realize that he had gotten up close and personal with a griz.

“I thought, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe I did it,’” Cottingham recalled.

Then, on May 7, Cottingham was making his wife a cocktail when he watched a grizzly chase a moose through the front yard, the second high-profile sighting of an ursus arctos horribilis in the Aspens this year. A few weeks earlier, a sow and her cub were caught on camera traipsing through the busy residential neighborhood that has become a hot spot for short-term rentals and tourists in western Jackson Hole.

The bear Cottingham spotted a decade ago had been seeking an elk that ranch hands with the Snake River Ranch had hung to season in the barn. Cottingham doesn’t know where the bear came from this year.

But, of one thing, he’s certain.

“They’re more prevalent, there’s no question of it,” he said.

Cottingham is correct. Grizzlies were first listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1975 and, in the intervening decades, as state and federal wildlife managers have worked to recover the species, their population has grown, including in the last decade. As that’s happened, their range has expanded from the core of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem out to farther flung locales like Ten Sleep and Kemmerer.

As a result, grizzlies have been found in areas that haven’t seen the bears for over half a century, including in places where locals aren’t particularly fond of having the bears in their backyards or on their ranches.

In Teton County, where celebrity bears like Grizzly 399 delight hordes of wildlife watchers, a similar shift has been happening. Grizzlies’ range has expanded out of Grand Teton National Park, reaching Jackson for the first time between 2000 and 2010. By 2020, their range included Hoback and Palisades Reservoir.

This spring, that range included Jackson Hole residents’ properties.

Between the two bears spotted in the Aspens, a grizzly that zipped through Hoback, and a grizzly photographed fording the Hoback River, there were an abnormally high number of early-season sightings.

“We haven’t seen multiple sightings at this time of year, so I would say that’s new,” said Dan Thompson, large carnivore supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “We’re still seeing an increase in grizzly bear abundance and density and distribution. You know, 10 years ago, we weren’t talking about bears below Grand Teton. So it’s natural expansion of the population into some of these areas.”

Researchers with the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team have said that everywhere in Teton County where grizzlies were seen this spring has been formally occupied for at least a decade. But even in those areas, grizzly populations are still growing, albeit at a slower rate than on the edge of their range.

“It’s all indicative of a very healthy, robust population,” Thompson said.

Bears have been seen south of Wilson before, but most sightings have been of one bear: 399, who traipsed south out of Grand Teton multiple times with her litter of four cubs. This year, by contrast, the bears are less known to wildlife managers. They haven’t been getting into much trouble on their travels.

“They’re moving through, they’re not causing problems, localizing or anything,” Thompson said.

Still, Thompson worries about conflict potential as bears roam more frequently into developed areas.

The department has gotten questions about how to handle grizzlies that newly emerged in suburban areas, and some people have asked the department to get the bears out of the area, which hasn’t happened yet.

When bears get into human-provided foods like garbage, or compost, or a grill left outside, they can become aggressive when they come back for seconds. When that happens, wildlife managers often kill the bears to prevent them from harming people, the origin of the phrase “a fed bear is a dead bear.”

But as bears find new homes in residential areas, as has happened in Cody, there are more nuanced situations that are difficult to manage, like what to do if a bear posts up in a front yard to nibble grass.

“Is that a bad thing? No,” Thompson said. “But if a bear lives in your front yard for a week, and you can’t go outside, yes, that becomes an issue.”

To prevent that from happening, bear managers have a number of tools at their disposal: Hazing with cracker shells and other loud noises, or electric tools like the “unwelcome mat,” which shocks bears when they cross it. But there are steps property owners and renters can take before bears set up shop, like securing garbage in bear-resistant containers and keeping it inside until the morning of garbage pick up, keeping grills inside when they’re not in use, and setting up electric fences around beehives and compost.

Pet owners also should keep dogs and other pets inside at night and feed pets inside.

Parents should closely supervise children who are playing outdoors.

Lana Koppenhafer, a wildlife photographer from Pinedale, spotted the grizzly fording the Hoback River in early May. For her, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She’d always wanted to photograph a grizzly and got that opportunity, watching as the bear chowed down on a carcass in the middle of the river.

“That was on my bucket list,” Koppenhafer said.

But the photographer also recognizes that grizzlies, while spectacular, can pose a risk to people.

“It’s kind of cool to have them around,” Koppenhafer said. “If people are smart about it, I don’t think there’s a problem, but I do think they will need to be managed or we will have problems with them.”

For her, management means hunting, which is all but certain if grizzlies are delisted.

Cottingham, the Aspens resident who has now had two run-ins with backyard grizzlies, has had his bear safety systems dialed for years: Carrying bells, making noise and hiking in groups of four or more people.

“You just have to learn to live with them around,” he said. “That’s just the way it is.”