A Bear of a Tale

My sister is backpacking in Yellowstone.
She went with her boyfriend, Bob, her very good and long time friend Anne from Oregon, and a gentleman from Montana. I think that’s the size of the group. She is going to be backpacking for 4 days, then spend two nights in a lodge. The backpacking is far, far, away from the lodge. They will have to drive “all the way around” to get from the trail to the lodge. It sounds pretty remote to me.

My sister called to tell me from Salt Lake City airport. “Oh yeah, last weekend we were in Yosemite. This week we’re going to Yellowstone.” She always seems to be on the go.

I asked her about bears.

Recently, bears have been in the news.

The ones in Yosemite have progressed from breaking neatly into cars (removing the weather stripping from around the edge of the car window), to breaking messily into houses. The bears have become fairly domesticated. They know where to find food, whether it’s hidden in a cooler or a refrigerator. Yosemite has a comprehensive program to reduce the interaction of bear and man, but the park has over 3 million visitors a year, and human food is highly attractive. This week alone, there have been 22 “bear incidents”. If you leave anything in a vehicle, it could attract a bear. If a Yosemite ranger sees an item in your car, they will wake you up anytime of night, have you remove the item, and fine you $5000.

These are Black bears, and generally weigh in the range of 300 pounds. However, the largest bear ever measured in Yosemite was 700 pounds. That’s a lot of bear.

The bears in Yellowstone are not so domesticated to human behavior. They are much more remote. “Elusive” as the park website describes them. Still, you do not want to stumble onto a bear. Black bears are more tolerant of humans, Grizzly bears less so. You do not want to get too close to a Grizzly.

In 1995, my sister and I were hiking down the wide expanse of a braided riverbed, in Denali National Park. Braided riverbeds are wide due to the meandering of the river, from year to year. The riverbed was crunchy gravel and silty sand, with occasional patches of pale, scrubby willow and brush. The sky was a wide expanse of washed out blue. Away to the left of us, some very nice men waved from the top of a remote cliff. They were tiny, and we could just see their arms moving.

They were pretty persistent wavers.

We kept hiking along, until it dawned on us, that maybe they weren’t waving just to say hello. We turned, hiked across the riverbed, and scrambled up a steep dirt embankment. At the top was a small construction site. Looking down into the riverbed, the men could see a Grizzly bear in front of us. We had been hiking straight towards the bear.

There was a dirt road that went along the embankment, paralleling the river, so we followed it, because we were pretty excited and wanted to get a closer look. We were pretty high up and could see down into the scrubby bush below. The bear was huge. A big, brown Grizzly. He was on the other side of the river—which at this point, was really just a narrow stream meandering through white, worn riverbed rocks. The bear was beautiful. You could see the power of his legs when he moved, walking from bush to bush, grazing on scrubby willow leaves. He didn’t pay any attention to us.

As we walked, the road started descending down hill. We were so excited, chattering to each other, that initially, we didn’t notice. Then the bear abruptly turned and crossed the stream, and we realized that we weren’t so high up, after all. Up until that moment, we had had this subconscious understanding that the stream, and the hill we were on, were some kind of demarcation of safety between us and the bear. The bear crossed the stream in what seemed to be two steps and started angling up the hill on the same side of the stream that we were on. Suddenly, we realized that we weren’t in a good place. We turned, and quickly made our way back up the road, fear now shadowing our thoughts, realizing that the natural world doesn’t subscribe to the same demarcations as man.

Now, my sister was calling to tell me she was going backpacking in another bear habitat.

When I asked her about bears, she said they had purchased bear spray.

The directions say that bears can run 40 miles an hour. Think about that.

When the bear is 40 feet away, you are supposed to give it a spray from the canister. If the bear keeps coming toward you, you are supposed to repeat this. If it continues to approach, you empty the can. Ha.

At 40 miles per hour, we figured you wouldn’t be taking the time to count your bear spray squirts.

We got off the phone, giggling.

Still, I’m worried about her.

Afterword

Even though we found the bear spray to be hysterically funny, I promised myself I wouldn’t post about it, until she came back safe and sound.

My sister called from among a throng of people at Old Faithful to tell me she was out of the bush, and OK. Didn’t see a bear the whole trip, but had a great time. Hot springs, good food, great people, beautiful countryside. That’s the way it should be when I’m worrying about my sister. No bears.

(There was another time in Alaska when we were truly scared out of our skin. Caused by a large bird. But could have been a bear. We screamed so loud, lost in a moment of utter, complete panic, that I can’t imagine having the wherewithal to manage a can of bear spray.)