From the big screen to the backcountry: Meet the Utah couple who raised Hollywood’s most famous bears

Heber City • One of the world’s largest predators can be found lumbering around the bubbling Daniels Creek in Heber City.

Tank the grizzly bear is not a native Utahn, but his ancestors are. On the property he calls home also sits a traditional pioneer cabin, built in the 1870s, a time when grizzlies still roamed the region.

The cabin will probably still stand when the next grizzly bears return to Utah, likely in part due to habitat conservation efforts from Tank’s human parents, Doug and Lynne Seus. The Seuses, now in their early 80s, have raised grizzlies by hand since the 1970s.

And you’ve probably seen their bruins on the silver screen.

Through the years, they’ve been featured in the 1997 Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin film “The Edge,” 2007’s Sean Penn-directed “Into the Wild,” the 1994 flick “Legends of the Fall” featuring Brad Pitt, and the 2011 movie “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson, among other films.

But as the Seuses age, they have reoriented themselves away from the film industry — which is relying more on computer-generated graphics rather than real animals — and toward their nonprofit.

The couple have been “blessed by the bears” for what the animals have given them, Lynne said, and they want to give back.

Wild origins

The Seuses have called Heber City home since the mid ‘70s. Both have some Utah roots — Doug played football at Brigham Young University in 1968, while Lynne moved to Utah from Nebraska after her mother became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The couple met at a diner where Lynne was working and later married in 1971. They were living in Los Angeles shortly after their marriage when they adopted their first wild animal.

“Doug came home, I think we’d just maybe [been] married a week and said, ‘Do you want to get a wolf instead of a dog?’” Lynne recalled. “And being, I think back in 1970-something, I said, ‘far out.’ And, oh, yeah, we did — so that was the start.”

They brought home their first wolf, a female they named Kiska, to their home in Los Angeles after seeing an advertisement for wolf pups in the Los Angeles Times, Lynne said. The family they purchased the pup from raised animals for films, she added.

The couple returned to Utah shortly after, initially relocating to Center Creek about 3½ miles from Heber. But they soon outgrew the 1-acre home when Kiska had puppies with Nero, a male wolf brought to the Seuses by “Wolfman” Jim Davis, a government trapper who lived near Lehi, who the Seuses believe owned some of the last native Utah wolves, Lynne said.

The Seuses moved into a farmhouse on Daniels Creek around 1975. Wolfman Jim, meanwhile, brought more and more animals to the couple. When trapping “varmints” for ranchers in the West Desert, he didn’t have the heart to drown the animals after they’d been captured — so the Seuses soon added skunks, coyotes, gray foxes, a badger and a bobcat kitten to their family, Lynne said.

They acquired a wildlife rehabilitation license from the state Division of Wildlife Resources, and Doug and Lynne bottle-fed all the baby animals to get them accustomed to living in the human world.

“The first thing they remember is a human giving them a bottle, petting them lovingly…” Lynne said. “And so what they remember was, ‘Oh, people fed me. They took care of me. They cuddled me. They never hurt me.’”

Their first job for the animals came along by chance. Lynne was shopping at a nearby hardware store with a basket full of baby skunks in tow, something she did often to socialize their animals, she said.

The skunks poked their tiny, curious noses out of the basket as Lynne browsed the store. Another customer asked her what she had in her basket, and when she explained she and Doug were hoping to train the skunks for films one day, the customer introduced himself as a prop master on a movie filming in Provo Canyon, Lynne recalled.

“[It was] a moment that changed our lives forever,” Lynne said.

The movie was “Baker’s Hawk,” a 1976 production starring Burl Ives, Clint Walker and Diane Baker — along with a few skunks, wolves and other animals provided by the Seuses. Just two years earlier, “The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams” had hit theaters, starring Dan Haggerty alongside a massive grizzly bear.

“At the end of that story,” Lynne said, “we knew that if we were ever going to make it, we were going to need a bear — and a big one.”

Bear beginnings

In 1977, Doug and Lynne became parents to their daughter, Sausha. They also became parents to two Kodiak bear cubs they named Bart and Zack.

The bears were born at a zoo in Baltimore, the result of an unplanned pregnancy. The zoo didn’t have room for the cubs at their facility, and no other zoo in the country would take them, Lynne wrote in her book, “The Grizzlies and Us.”

So the Seuses sent off a $50 check to the zoo, and equipped with a license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture allowing them to house wild animals, they picked up the cubs from the Salt Lake City airport while Lynne was 8½ months pregnant in February 1977.

Kodiaks are one of the largest species of bears in the world, tied only with polar bears.

They’re larger than grizzlies likely due to their high-protein diets and abundance of food, according to the federal government. Kodiaks can also weigh twice as much as grizzly bears and can stand at about 10 feet tall on their hind legs compared to a grizzly’s 8 feet.

But when the Seuses brought Bart and Zack home, the cubs weighed about as much as their newborn daughter — 6 pounds each.

“That lasted about a day,” Lynne recalled while sitting in her living room across from a leather couch covered in patch tape masking the marks from baby bear claws.

The same year Bart was born, he got his first on-screen credit with the NBC series “Grizzly Adams,” which was filmed in Kamas Valley. Zack, the shyer of the two bruins, later found a new home at a Nebraska zoo when the Seuses realized he didn’t want a life in the spotlight.

But for Bart, a life on screen persisted. He went on to star in more than 30 film and television shows, alongside some of the industry’s biggest names. Bart even presented alongside Mike Myers at the 1998 Academy Awards

“I would love people to recognize how beautiful, emotional, loving these animals are,” Doug said. “ I would love to see the next generation, and even this generation … to see the beauty and the magic of what they are.”

Preservation efforts

One of the highlights of Bart’s career was “The Bear,” a French film released in 1988 that was filmed in the Dolomites, a mountain range in northeastern Italy.

To get there, Bart boarded a Lufthansa jumbo jet that was half passenger cabin and half cargo hold. Bart’s multi-ton trailer was loaded into the cargo hold, and Doug rode in the hold with Lynne’s older son from a previous relationship, Clint, thanks to portable oxygen masks, Lynne wrote in her book.

When they were on set in the Dolomites, Lynne noticed a buzzing crowd forming. As she walked over to see what was going on, she saw a marmot was the subject of the crowd’s attention.

The tiny rodents are relatively common in Utah, so Lynne laughed when she spotted the animal. Another crew member asked her why she was laughing before telling her the animal was “all we have left,” Lynne recalled.

Doug knew all along that the lives of their bears “had to matter for something more than movies,” Lynne said, but that was the moment that led to the creation of the couple’s nonprofit, the Vital Ground Foundation, aimed at ensuring the wildlife of the Rocky Mountains didn’t dwindle like the marmots of the Dolomites.

In 1990, the Seuses used money from their savings to buy 240 acres of forest and wetland in Montana — prime grizzly habitat, according to Vital Ground. The Seuses just celebrated the 35th anniversary of the nonprofit, which has now preserved more than a million acres for wildlife.

Giving back

Since 1990, Doug and Lynne added three more bruins to their family: Bart II, his sister Honey Bump, and Tank. Tank was adopted by the Seuses in 1995 and was born in captivity. Bart II and Honey Bump were orphans, and they were rescued by Alaska Fish and Game officers after their mother was shot.

Looking back on their life with the bears, one of the couple’s favorite memories was a night on set with Bart II while they were in New Zealand filming “Without a Paddle,” a 2004 comedy starring Seth Green, Matthew Lillard and Dax Shepard.

“You’re in a different hemisphere, and that bear got out of his transport trailer, and he looked up, and he looked up, and he looked up,” Lynne recalled. “He looked this way. He walked in a circle… he knew he was in another hemisphere. And I think, being very anthropomorphic, I was thinking that he thought, ‘How the hell am I going to walk home?’”

Bart I died in May 2000, just weeks before the Seuses adopted Bart II and Honey Bump. Bart II died in 2021. Tank, now 31, and Honey Bump, 25, are the only two animals the Seuses still have under their care — beyond Lynne’s two “froufrou” dogs, Digger and Millie.

The bears both still enjoy their daily romp across the couple’s property, swim in their enlarged pond fed by Daniels Creek and trek over foothills that are marked off for their use with an electric hot wire.

The acting gigs have slowed, however, and the Seuses have shifted their focus to conservation.

As they wind down their careers, Lynne and Doug hope young people will take a chance, chase their dreams and give something back to the planet, just like they have.

“Make something happen,” Doug said. “Do some good. Save this hanging ball.”

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