Third time’s a charm: Landfill puts up new fence to keep brown bears at bay - Chilkat Valley News

A six-week construction project has culminated in what Community Waste Solutions general manager Craig Franke hopes will be a solid defense against a furry menace: brown bears.

“So this was our third and final iteration here,” he said, walking up to the thick wooden fence posts that now encircle most of the perimeter of the facility. Weed-barrier wrapped chain link fence, anchored in place with a thick cable woven through the top and around a perimeter fence of poles, extends several feet into the ground. Electrical wires hang between each pole – designed to repel hungry bears.

Franke’s landfill, a hilly expanse at the end of FAA Road, has seen its fair share of bear incursions over the years. Before 2019, when it was first fenced, he said it resembled the “wild west.”

“The most bears I ever saw up here at one time, one day there were nine,” he said. “That was the most, but during 2019-2020 at any given time, day or night, you could walk up to the landfill and see a bear.”

Since then, staff at the landfill have made several attempts to secure the perimeter – with varying degrees of success.

“The first one was just four strands of electric wire,” he said. “But the bears were testing it and they were coming in under it and pushing it.”

So, they built a second one. This one with strands of barbed wire in between the hot wires. Staff would come in, look at the ruins of a fence and then reverse engineer how the bear did it and try to fix it.

“The thought was if the power went off, or if they got the fence grounded – sometimes they’ll come up and test it and they’ll back out of it real fast and the wires wrap up [and ground out] – so we thought if we had barbed wire, we still have something to kind of discourage them,” he said.

But then the bears started tunneling.

“They dug one excavation on that north end – they probably moved 20-25 cubic yards of material. There was a giant crater,” he said. “First we started dropping big rocks in the holes they were coming under. Then of course they would move over.”

Franke said starting on the Fourth of July in 2023, they started getting in and it was an ongoing battle until they hibernated last fall.

This year, they took the fence down and installed heavier and taller creosoted poles, excavated around the perimeter and dug straight down with the chain link fence. Now, in order to tunnel under, a bear will need to dig more than four feet to get under the curtain.

As autumn approaches, Franke and his team are waiting on the ultimate test of their latest fence: whether it can withstand hungry, food-aggressive bears preparing to hibernate. For now, early signs are promising – there have been no breaches since the new fence went in.

“Experience teaches me that we’ll know how effective we were at this in October,” he said.

All told, Franke estimates he spent about $60,000 on labor and materials for the fences. Though, this latest iteration used old telephone poles that had been discarded at the landfill.

“They were just laying here taking up space,” Franke said.

After they installed those, staff strung up an old gillnet that serves to catch blowing litter or debris.

For now, the fate of the landfill’s newfound defenses is uncertain. Franke said he is hopeful but doesn’t discount how resourceful the Chilkat Valley’s brown bears have been at getting at the garbage.

“The running joke I have with my family and friends is about matching wits with the bears and I haven’t beaten them yet,” Franke said.