Columbia Falls' Bear Ordinance Was Built to Expire. Part of It Might Not.

"One of the worst natural food failure years on record." That's how Jamie Jonkel, the longtime bear conflict specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in Missoula, described 2026 to the Flathead Beacon. He wasn't talking about crops. He was talking about berries, and the bears now walking into Columbia Falls to find what the hillsides didn't grow.

On Monday, September 21, the Columbia Falls City Council voted unanimously to pass Emergency Ordinance No. 846, a temporary set of rules governing how residents store garbage, pet food, and anything else that smells like dinner to a hungry grizzly. It took effect the moment the gavel came down. Most of the coverage since has focused on the mechanics: what goes in the can, when the can goes to the curb, what counts as secured. That's worth knowing. But the more interesting story is what the city is already saying about the next version of this rule, the one that won't expire.

What Changed This Week

The ordinance is specific about timing and storage, not vague guidance. Garbage can't hit the curb before 4 a.m. on pickup day. Anything that qualifies as an attractant, garbage, food-soiled recycling, food waste, pet feed, has to live in a bear-resistant container, a garage, or a locked shed. Not a truck bed. Not an open porch. Not an unsecured bin in the yard. Commercial dumpsters have to stay closed and latched. And for the first time in the city's ordinance history, intentionally feeding a bear is now explicitly illegal.

A shorter list of practices is recommended rather than required: picking ripe fruit before it drops, pulling bird feeders in at night, storing grills and coolers somewhere a nose can't find them, and putting electric fencing around chicken coops, livestock feed, or compost. If your property doesn't have room for secure on-site storage, the city pointed residents to the free Flathead County solid waste container site at 1073 Best Way as a fallback option.

Enforcement starts soft. For the first 14 calendar days, meaning through roughly October 5, the city says it will lead with education and written warnings rather than citations. That grace period isn't unconditional. A citation can still be issued sooner if a violation creates an immediate safety threat, results in a documented bear conflict, or repeats after someone's already been warned. The ordinance itself is built to sunset. State law caps emergency ordinances at 90 days, which puts this one's expiration somewhere around late December, unless the council renews it or replaces it with something more permanent.

This Isn't the First Time, and That's the Point

Columbia Falls passed a nearly identical ordinance once before, in September 2022, after a cold spring and a hot, dry late summer wrecked that year's berry crop. The specifics then were narrower. Attractants had to be stored indoors or in bear-resistant cans, trash could only go out the morning of pickup rather than a hard 4 a.m. line, and there was no explicit language making it a violation to feed a bear on purpose. The city's approach was more improvisational. Justine Vallieres, the FWP bear specialist working the valley at the time, personally helped string electric fencing around the dumpsters at the Highline Apartments after grizzlies kept getting into them, and a sow grizzly wandered the city's east side for months while trap attempts failed.

Four years later, the numbers suggest this year is worse, not just repetitive. The Flathead Valley has recorded five grizzly mortalities so far in 2026, compared with two over the same period last year. Last year's two weren't conflict removals. This year's count includes one: a food-conditioned bear euthanized near Whitefish in July. The pattern that produced the 2022 ordinance, a bad berry season pushing bears toward human food sources, has repeated, but with a higher body count and a city government that's now writing tighter, more specific rules the second time around.

The Trail That's Still Closed

The immediate trigger for this year's ordinance wasn't just a bad berry season in the abstract. In early September, a woman walking her dog on the Cedar Flats trail complex, a popular hiking and mountain biking network just north of town, was attacked by what officials believe was a female grizzly with at least one cub, in what the Flathead Beacon described as a surprise, defensive encounter. She sustained significant injuries and was taken to Logan Health Medical Center. FWP and U.S. Forest Service investigators searched for the bear using a drone equipped with thermal cameras and came up empty. As of the most recent reporting, Cedar Flats remains closed until further notice.

That closure matters beyond the trail itself. Cedar Flats is one of the more heavily used recreation areas immediately adjacent to town, the kind of place a lot of Columbia Falls residents treat as an extension of their own yard. When it closes, that's not an abstract wildlife statistic. It's a hole in the weekly routine for anyone who runs, rides, or walks a dog north of the railroad tracks.

Where the City Says This Is Actually Headed

The most telling part of the council discussion wasn't about this year's emergency rules. It was about what comes after them. A city official identified in reporting as Hanks told the council that FWP has "consistently identified or requested stronger guidance in our ordinances within our city for unsecured garbage and other food attractants." The planning commission has already started early conversations about a longer-term ordinance that would split Columbia Falls into zones, with tighter requirements, like mandatory bear-resistant containers, concentrated on the east side of town where most bear activity has been reported. Hanks said the city is aiming for Bear Smart Community status in 2027, a designation tied to standards set by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee.

That zoning conversation is happening inside a bigger one. The same planning commission meeting that discussed bear zones also touched on protecting Garnier Creek and Trumble Creek as the city grows, and on the fact that Columbia Falls itself used to function as a large wildlife corridor, open fields that bears, deer, and everything else moved through freely before the town filled in around them. One commissioner noted that the health of the Flathead River is part of what makes Columbia Falls the kind of place people want to live, which is exactly why protecting it, and figuring out how density and wildlife corridors coexist, is now a live question for city planners rather than a settled one. The city hasn't gotten clear guidance yet from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks on how to preserve those corridors while still building the housing density the city says it wants.

In other words, this week's trash can rules are the visible, temporary layer. Underneath them, the city is working out something that will outlast the 90-day clock, a permanent, geography-based answer to a problem that isn't going away when the berries come back.

What This Actually Means for the Next Few Months

If you live on the east side of Columbia Falls, closer to the mountains, you're the most likely to see a bear this fall, and you're also the neighborhood most likely to end up under whatever permanent zoning rule eventually replaces this emergency one. If you live anywhere else in town, the ordinance still applies to you fully. Bears follow the Flathead River, and the reporting on this has been consistent that they can turn up anywhere the river takes them, not just the east side.

The practical version: check your trash timing, secure anything that smells like food, and if Cedar Flats is part of your regular walk, plan on a detour until the city says otherwise. The ordinance runs through roughly late December unless renewed. What happens after that, whether the city moves toward the zoned, permanent version discussed at the planning commission, is worth watching if you want to understand where Columbia Falls is actually headed, not just what's required this week.

We've spent enough years working in Cascade County and across Montana's rural interface to know that the rules governing how a town coexists with its wildlife say as much about a place as its housing stock does. If you're trying to understand what's actually happening on the ground in a Montana community, not just the listing price, Tyree Real Estate is a good place to start that conversation.