More than six years after a hiker photographed what experts at the time said was a grizzly bear in North Cascades National Park in upstate Washington, the National Park Service is proposing to help the bruins repopulate the park via a recovery plan that seeks to establish a self-sustaining population of 200 grizzlies.

Six months after a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service erred in its decision to deny Endangered Species Act protections for wolverines, the agency is reconsidering the matter and revisiting a past proposal to give the small predator a "threatened" designation under the act.

How much does a grizzly bear weigh when it’s born? How many used to live in the contiguous 48 states? What is a bear’s most common food?

The motorboat pulls away and disappears across Ross Lake, leaving us in a silence as expansive as the wilderness surrounding us. We shoulder our backpacks and hike up the Big Beaver Trail through a forest drunk on photosynthesis. Ancient cedar and Douglas fir trees rise taller than it seems our necks can tilt backward to view them. We pass red cedars as thick as 15 feet at their base—trees that germinated a millennium ago, around the time that Leif Erikson sailed the East Coast of North America. True to the trail’s name, we pass sprawling beaver ponds.