Unfortunately, given the nature of grizzlies being wide ranging species, it’s not practical to look at population densities on such scales. Grizzly bears are managed for occupancy at the bear management unit (bmu), which is generally at the watershed level. So a single mountain range could have several to dozens of watersheds. Each bmu was established to approximate the lifetime home range of a single adult female. To further complicate things, there are also demographic monitoring areas (dma), which is where demographics (births, immigrations, deaths, emigrations) are monitored. These data can produce a truer density estimate. But bears and bmu’s occur both in and out of dma’s, so it really muddies the water in terms of getting a true density estimation. The counts are more like trend data, like winter aerial elk counts. It won’t tell you with certainty how many occur in an area, but it tells you what you tend to see over time. With those data you can make inferences of population sizes useful for management.
what does that mean for your question- there are no data that exist where someone could say with anywhere near 100% certainty how many bears exist in any one mountain range to compare against the whole to determine one with the most. Even the best mark-recapture data come as a range, with the likely number and it’s confidence interval of a low and a high estimate of the total population. Arguably the best data collected for grizzly populations in the NCDE was a Herculean effort led by Kate Kendall that took years to complete and is now outdated.
This is a good read and worth the time if you’re interested in how she did that. Anyhow, I’m blabbering…