GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – Sunset was nearing when the little black bear, just over a year old, ambled through narrow lodgepole pines toward the RV park. Peter Waite, a retired oral surgeon, called out to it with gentle firmness.

“Go on, bear! Go on!” Waite said.

The animal swerved behind a small building as Waite and another man followed, herding the yearling like sheepdogs and instructing the smattering of passersby to steer clear. The two wore yellow vests, signs of their membership in a highly unusual and elite American volunteer group: Grand Teton’s Wildlife Brigade.

Officially, the team manages the “human-wildlife interface,” keeping visitors and the creatures that inhabit this alpine landscape safe around each other. In practice, this mostly means bringing order to the hordes of people who crowd park roads each summer, clamoring to get a glimpse of bears so famous that they are tracked worldwide, and creating what are known here as “bear jams.”

The task becomes more challenging each year. Grand Teton logged more than 3.4 million visits in 2023, a 22 percent increase over the year before. The bear population is growing, too. Twenty years ago, grizzlies had barely begun spreading into this area from Yellowstone National Park to the north, where the endangered species began rebounding in the 1980s. Today, as many as 1,200 grizzlies live in the area’s greater ecosystem, along with an even bigger black bear population.

In Grand Teton, several of them – including the most celebrated and chronicled ursine of all, a 28-year-old sow known as 399 – forage near roadsides in the spring, drawing tourists and traffic congestion that hinders the animals’ ability to move freely. By the end of August, the park had tallied 651 wildlife jams, two-thirds involving grizzly or black bears; moose fueled a distant third.

And as each situation developed, brigade members’ radios crackled, summoning those on duty to hop in park-owned cars marked “Wildlife Management” and get to the scene.

They are bodyguards for bears, bouncers without the brawn. Their tools of the trade include orange cones for blocking off roadsides, metal signs for stopping or slowing traffic, noisemakers to intimidate the animals and canisters of bear spray (though their leader, the park’s bear biologist, says he has never had to deploy it).

Perhaps surprisingly, brigadiers say their work rarely involves shouting. They are provided with a book titled “Verbal Judo” and urged to put its lessons in gentle persuasion into practice.

“We see visitors that get into little fisticuffs over things,” said Justin Schwabedissen, Grand Teton’s bear biologist. Yet more often, veteran volunteer Jeff Willemain said, the team hears gratitude.

“Thank you so much, people say – as if you actually had something to do with the bears and the moose coming out,” said Willemain, a former Deloitte executive who, along with his wife, Chris, has been on the brigade for a decade. They recalled meeting a couple who said they had been visiting for years without a bear sighting. Not long after, they saw them again, crying with joy while watching a sow and her cubs.

The Willemains were patrolling at the southern end of the park on a Monday morning this month. There had already been a jam involving “two magnificent bull moose” and one German tourist who got too close, Willemain said.

“They’re the one animal that doesn’t give you any notice before charging,” Willemain had told the man. “He understood, and everything was fine.”

Schwabedissen joined the brigade as an intern in 2011, when just a few people were involved. Now it has interns, two seasonal employees and 32 volunteers, many of whom help out at parks in warmer locales during winter. Their ranks include retired engineers, chemists and a rear admiral. This summer, while managing a jam watching grizzly 399, one crew member with medical training performed CPR on a visitor who’d suffered cardiac arrest.

The Wildlife Brigade is the only such volunteer-led group at a national park site and getting a spot is not easy. Schwabedissen said he has a waiting list dozens of names long. Key qualities, he said, include flexibility and resilience.

A dash of school-principal energy doesn’t hurt, either. A few hours after the moose jam, brigadier Robert Clark walked briskly, hands behind his back, within a fast-burgeoning crowd watching a cow moose and calf wade on spindly legs through the sparkling water of Sawmill Ponds.

“No running,” he said quietly to a young man racing up a path where the moose’s path might take them. “We’re staying right here.”

Brigade members also have less glamorous duties, such as clearing the carcasses of the dozens of large animals killed by vehicles each year. They patrol campgrounds, telling visitors to lock up their food, because things do not typically end well for bears who develop a taste for s’mores and hot dogs and become aggressive in their pursuit of them.

This year, the park has relocated four food-habituated black bears out of Grand Teton and euthanized two others – more than usual and proof of the challenge of intermingling bears, humans and human food, Schwabedissen said.

Among those previously killed because of conflicts with people – in this case, cattle ranchers – is an offspring of 399 that is now stuffed and on display in a bear education trailer that Waite was manning on a recent afternoon.

“Do you have the best job ever?” a tourist asked him as she approached to pose for a picture with the taxidermied bear.

One reason 399 is so famous is because she has cohabitated for so long with her adoring masses. In the spring of 2023, she emerged with one cub, becoming at age 27 the oldest documented grizzly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to reproduce. She has had 18 cubs, including one litter of four.

Wildlife Brigade members field endless queries about her – and perform crowd control with the sunup-to-sundown tailgaters that Schwabedissen says have prompted a rising number of road closings meant to give wildlife breathing room.

“We now have visitors that aren’t interested in seeing any bear in the park,” he said. “It has to be the bear.”

“Every day. Everywhere. Every nationality. She’s internationally known,” said volunteer Tony Kirby, a retired air traffic controller from Michigan.

At this time of year, most grizzlies are at higher elevations. Black bears often are still nearby, feasting on berries, and while they are very much on the celebrity B-list, they can attract sizable enough crowds when scaling trees on Moose Wilson Road, causing branches to bend over cars.

That’s when the brigade might turn the road into a one-way, so any acrobatic bear has the lane below to itself.

The yearling black bear at the Colter Bay RV Park had been causing a stir for a few days. Its mother had raised it and a sibling in that area last summer. But now it was on its own and suddenly hanging around the lake marina and beach, perhaps in search of Oregon grapes that tend to be abundant nearby but also getting perilously close to people.

The day before, Waite had “babysat” as it napped in a tree for three hours. Earlier in the morning, other volunteers had shooed it away from humans, into the woods. Now, at sunset, it had returned – “boomeranging” back to familiar terrain, as Tyler Brasington, a bear management ranger, put it.

Waite, Brasington and volunteer George Angelo formed a V-shape, herding and shouting at the yearling through the trees, across paved paths and a road. A tourist followed with a cellphone, joking about how the bear was just like a kid, not following directions.

Eventually, it disappeared into the woods near the horse stables, which were now closed for the season. That was good enough for the moment.

“The bear moved where we wanted him to go,” said Angelo. “We love it when they cooperate.”