Interior Department officials have ordered the National Park Service to halt work on a grizzly recovery plan for the North Cascades Ecosystem, which includes North Cascades National Park/North Cascades Institute

While the National Park Service back in January outlined a plan to help grizzly bears repopulate North Cascades National Park with hopes of establishing a self-sustaining population of 200 grizzlies, Interior Department officials have put the brakes on that effort.

“We were in the process of evaluating public comment,” North Cascades Superintendent Karen Taylor-Goodrich said of the stop order. “We’re in year three of the process and all the public scoping has been done. The draft EIS went out for public review in spring and we’ve received about 127,000 comments.”

For more than two decades biologists have been working to recover the North Cascades' grizzlies, a threatened species. And while more than a few reports of grizzly sightings in the ecosystem that stretches north to Canada are received by state and federal officials each year, most turn out to be black bears.

Back in the spring of this year, the Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released for public review a draft document that examines how a grizzly bear population might be established in the park. The alternatives were described in the draft Grizzly Bear Restoration Plan/Environmental Impact Statement.

According to the Missoulian newspaper of Montana, which on Saturday reported the Park Service's withdrawal from work on the grizzly EIS, the North Cascades ecosystem covers nearly 10,000 square miles and holds only about five-to-10 grizzlies. The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee views that low population as “the most at-risk grizzly bear population in the U.S. today," the newspaper reported.

Earlier this year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it would remove from Endangered Species Act protection grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which is believed to hold at least 700 grizzlies. However, the agency recently reopened the comment period on that proposal.