Debra Halloway was on a Sunday evening bicycle ride through a subdivision south of Driggs last month when she heard a crash in the sagebrush on the side of the road.

She turned to see a grizzly bear in full charge, heading straight for her. Halloway had just shifted into a higher gear and pedaled hard until she outran the sow, which was protecting two cubs.

"Only because she was on a bike was she able to get away," said Steve Schmidt, Idaho Department of Fish and Game's regional director in Idaho Falls.

Bears in Yellowstone National Park are getting the headlines this year - officials there are trying to capture a grizzly bear that killed 59-year-old John Wallace of Chassell, Mich., while he hiked near the wildlife-rich Hayden Valley last week. His death was the second grizzly killing of the summer - and only the third since 1986.

But Halloway's close call in eastern Idaho and the North Idaho case of Jeremy Hill, who was charged last week with a misdemeanor for killing a grizzly that came near his house while his children were outside, are just two examples of the rising number of encounters between grizzly bears and humans across the region.

ON THE RISE

By the time they were declared a threatened species soon after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, grizzly numbers had dropped to only a few remnant populations in Yellowstone and high in the mountains around Glacier National Park in Montana and in the Selkirks in North Idaho.

Since the 1980s, when federal officials began restricting bear killings, protecting bear habitat and embarking on a massive education campaign, grizzly numbers have steadily risen throughout the Northern Rockies. At the same time, second-home development has filled in much of the private lands that surround the remote tracts of federal land where grizzly bears still live.

As many as 1,600 bears roam the Glacier, Bob Marshall and Yellowstone ecosystems in and around Montana, and up to 70 are believed to live in the Selkirks in North Idaho. Smaller populations are known to live in the Cabinet Mountains of North Idaho and Montana and the North Cascades in Washington.

In Yellowstone, education and other efforts have helped managers reduce bear-caused injuries from an average of 47.9 a year in the 1930s - when just around 300,000 people visited each year - to an average of 5.1 injuries a year in the 2000s, even as park visitors have risen to nearly 3 million a year.

The park has implemented garbage management and camping rules to keep human food away from bears. And officials use seasonal closures and quick responses when bears show up around developments and roads to keep them away from people.

But tourists still push the boundaries of safety around grizzlies, like they do with all of the park's dangerous wildlife, said Al Nash, a Park Service spokesman.

In the case of Wallace, he hiked into one of the most densely bear-populated areas of the park- alone and without bear spray, which park officials now strongly recommend carrying.

"We're disheartened, we're saddened," Nash said. "It's a tragedy for (Wallace's) family."

EXPANDING TERRITORY

Yellowstone is no longer the only place where people regularly see bears. Grizzlies have expanded their range and numbers in all directions. Island Park, the forest town just west of Yellowstone in Idaho, now has its own resident population of bears.

This summer, a woman there had to lean on her door to keep a bear out of her house, Schmidt said.

"We're telling people in Island Park you should expect to encounter a grizzly bear anywhere there," said Schmidt. "That's a whole new paradigm up there."

Teton County, where Halloway biked away from the sow, is the fastest-growing county in Idaho, growing by 69.5 percent since 2000. The sow and her cubs have been seen several times on the valley floor - in subdivisions and even in the city of Driggs itself.

Chris Laing, a Driggs man who works in a nursery, was hiking down the Teton Canyon trail on the west slope of the Tetons in early June when his dog riled a mother grizzly with two cubs. The bear charged to within a few feet of Laing, when he sprayed it with pepper spray he keeps in a holster on his hip.

"She did not like it at all," Laing said in a telephone interview Monday. "It immediately turned her around."

She charged twice more - and the spray stopped her all three times.

Valley Citizen co-editor Jeannette Boner of Driggs said the response in the community was immediate.

"They were selling out of bear spray," she said.

IDAHO NEEDS A PLAN

Bears breed only once every three years, so the population growth is slow. The researchers of the Yellowstone Interagency Grizzly Bear Research Team are just finishing up counting bears this season.

Mark Haroldsen, one of the team biologists, said he expects the number of females with cubs will be down after two relatively high years. But there are more than three times as many bears in greater Yellowstone than there were in the 1980s.

Grizzly numbers are rising in North Idaho, too, said Wayne Wakkinen, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game grizzly bear biologist in Bonners Ferry. But unlike in eastern Idaho, where grizzlies were delisted and then returned to the list by a federal judge, they are far from recovered up north. The relisting is under appeal.

Still, North Idaho grizzly encounters, like the Mother's Day incident in which Hill shot a 2-year-old male with its mother and another bear nearby, are becoming more common.

"Before, it was unusual for anybody to see a grizzly bear out there," Wakkinen said.

That means managers and local officials have to do the same kind of education efforts the National Park Service does in Yellowstone to eliminate garbage and keep people safe. But it's not easy with hummingbird feeders and bird feeders filled with black sunflower seeds popular with homeowners.

"Idaho is not a national park," said Fish and Game's Schmidt. "The principles that are used to manage Yellowstone National Park are not going to be used here."