WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont. — Revel, a 531-pound grizzly, used his massive paws to search for a revelation.
Standing upright against the blue Montana sky and horizon of pines and snowcapped mountains, he spent long stretches of the morning feeling the edges of the commercial trash bin.
He could find no crack or welder's slag to rip open the can to gobble up the bait of fish, beaver oil, fruit and jelly inside.
After 90 minutes of testing the can, built in Caqon City, Colo., Revel had nothing to show for his patient effort at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center.
The ingenuity of 95 draftsmen, metal cutters and welders at Colorado's Fremont Correctional Facility had won out in the latest round of the campaign to keep bears out of the garbage.
Easy snacks are a common source for the rising numbers of run-ins between bruins and humans across the fast-growing Interior West, where urban sprawl puts more people, and their food, in bears' way.
"Garbage is like crack cocaine for bears: It only takes one time," said Boulder, Colo., native Derek Reich, a wildlife photographer and board member of the Living with Wildlife Foundation.
But it is a difficult challenge to make trash cans cheap and simple enough for people to use — and tricky and tough enough to outwit nature's smartest, strongest problem-solvers.
Soon after the inmates' design outlasted the brains of one bear last week, it proved no match for another's brawn.
Sam, a 900-pounder, sniffed at the can's edges for only a minute or two. Then he rose on his back legs, spread them for leverage and pushed with his front paws to send the 425-pound can tumbling.
He rolled it like a ball across the hilly landscape about five times over the next hour. Eventually, the booty inside spilled from the edges of the lid — the pride of the inmates' supposedly bear-proof design.
Inmates will reconfigure the lid, and the Yellowstone bears will get another shot at it by summer's end, said Alison Morgan, a Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman.
She points out, rightly, that the inmate-designed can proved durable enough for Colorado. The state has no grizzlies and its male black bears average 275 pounds, according to the state Division of Wildlife.
Colorado's black bears are paying the price for urban foraging.
As berries and nuts dry up in the backcountry, foraging bears penetrate campgrounds, backyards and city suburbs in search of pet food, bird seed — even the grease on barbecue grills.
The nearly assured result: "dead bears," said Minette Johnson, Northern Rockies field representative for Defenders of Wildlife, who specializes in preventing the mix of human and bruin.
Over the past four years, 1,028 bears were killed by nonhunters, compared to 397 deaths between 1996 through 1999, according to the state Division of Wildlife.
Consequently, several towns and counties across Colorado's bear country have adopted ordinances requiring wildlife-resistant cans for homes, camps and businesses. Those on the bandwagon include Aspen, Vail, Steamboat Springs, Telluride and Summit County.
Colorado is not alone in its dilemma with growing populations encountering hungry bears, said Patti Sowka, the foundation director.
"New Jersey is working on this problem, California is working on this problem and Florida is working on this problem," she said. "It's not just Yellowstone, Yosemite and (Lake) Tahoe anymore."
Conservationists believe bear-resistant devices will deter more animals and, in the process, save their lives. And, instinctively, the animals will steer clear of people — unless a meal is involved, that is.
Then there's the memory angle. Bears have great power to remember. If a bear comes prowling around for food and finds nothing, it probably won't be back, Reich said.
But if it finds food just one time, it will check back repeatedly, and may teach its cubs to look there.
The inmate labor force at Fremont Correctional Facility saw that niche market — better bear cans — as well as the opportunity to do something good for the community and nature, said Dan Veatch, manager of the prison's industries.
Through trial and error, the inmates have been gaining ground on outsmarting the bears since they began producing the bear-resistant cans about two years ago.
Veatch hopes the latest design can revolutionize the bearish market and lead to a patent.
From the outside, the commercial can looks pretty much like any other — a big block of metal with a lid on a hinge.
The secret is in the lock. When the can is hoisted and tilted over a dump truck, the lid unlocks itself and drops the trash.
When it is lowered back down, the lid closes and relocks, secure enough that a black bear or a smaller grizzly could not gain access.
Chad Bauer, operations manager for Browning-Ferris Industries in Montana, whose job requires keeping up with advancements in bear-proof products, said the Colorado inmates are onto something.
The biggest knock against anti-bear cans is they slow down the truck drivers, who must get out, unlock the can, get back in the truck, dump it, get out again and relock it, Bauer said.
"If it works the way they say it works, then that's really innovative," Bauer said.
The bear-resistant commercial bins cost garbage pickup customers $1,100 to $2,000, depending on the accompanying contract for collection, Bauer said. That's about double the cost of a regular receptacle, he said.
For households, bear-resistant cans cost about between $160 and $200 retail, but some garbage pickup customers can rent them for an extra $10 or so a month, said Brandon Mauk of Solid Waste Systems in Parker, Colo., which buys metal parts from the prison for its bear-resistant residential cans.