Back in the late 1970's I was assigned an article by what was then a major outdoor magazine on the "bear rangers" of Glacier National Park. Their job was to prevent problems between tourists and grizzly bears, and I'd follow one of the rangers (a fellow student at the U. of Montana) around for a few days and see what happened.
It just so happened that a "sub-adult" male bear was hanging out near one of the back-country chalets, where a lot of tourists hiked in and stayed. He hadn't been causing any problems, but the rangers who'd seen the bear estimated his weight at anywhere from 175 to 300 pounds. These were people who'd often tranquilizer-darted grizzlies to move them out of heavy tourist-use areas.
We found the bear very soon, within sight of the chalet. In fact people lined up with binoculars and spotting scopes to watch him feeding on glacier lilies a quarter-mile away, but the bear soon wandered off, and my buddy and I followed him.
It turned out the other reason the bear was hanging out in the area--near one of the major trails into the chalet--was a mountain goat carcass near the main trail. We had an interesting encounter with the bear on the carcass, and the head bear ranger decided to dart and move him somewhere far, far away.
I got to go along and photograph the darting, which ended up with the bear running into nearby timber, and the rangers (with me right behind, armed with only a camera) not finding the bear until half an hour later, when the boar had started to recover from the tranquilizer. The bear couldn't stand up, but when one of the rangers poked him in the butt with the muzzle of the tranquilizer gun, the bear turned and bit the muzzle, growling loudly. Whereupon he was was darted again.
There's a lot more to the story, but it turned out the bear weighed 118 pounds.
