Without pausing the bear turned his head to hungrily inspect us as he sauntered by. As KING of the trail I guess he decide we were beneath him and continued on until vanishing around the next bend. I swear his look turned from one of hunger to that of disdain as he passed us by before fixing his gaze back on the trail ahead of him. Shaken, unharmed and relieved we returned to our campsite and recovered before our next adventure. Next adventure? You bet! The trip wasn’t over and there were more bear encounters in store for us.

We didn’t let the encounter daunt us as we continued exploring the park and taking advantage of the many park programs while showing the children the abundant wildlife in the area. One afternoon while our son was taking a nap I took our daughter for a short hike at the park’s edge. It was a pleasant enough hike and we enjoyed it but being very young our daughter got tired and I ended up carrying her back to the campsite. Deciding to save time while exposing our daughter to a mini-adventure I decided to take an uncharted shortcut. In hindsight this was perhaps not one of my better decisions.

We had to cross a jumbled boulder and rock barrier in order to get back. The boulders ranged in size from a few feet in diameter to twenty feet or larger. The jumbled boulders lay against and on top of each other forming mini-caves and tunnels criss crossing the entire field. Unfortunately the entrances to these tunnels on the uphill side (where we were) were to large for me to get through. And the boulders were too large for me to safely carry our daughter over the field although I wouldn’t have much trouble climbing over them.

Fortunately (it seemed at the time) I found a tunnel that our daughter could fit through and where I spied the exit on the other side. Telling our daughter go through the tunnel and wait for me on the other side I sent her on her way and climbed to the top where I could see both the upper and lower entrances.

Suddenly there was this huge commotion below me and my daughter came rushing back out running full bore. At the other end this brown streak shot out disappearing rapidly out of sight. They had scared each other! It was like a scene from a bad comic movie. He wasn’t a large bear but he was large enough to give me recurrent nightmares for years (I still dream about it now and then). A real trooper our daughter agreed to try the tunnel again. I met her on the other side and we proceeded on without further incident.

As encounters go our last bear encounter on the vacation was rather benign. It was next to our last day in camp and my wife was fixing dinner when suddenly we heard a clamor of clanging pots and the noise of a yelling mob off in the distance. Rapidly the din became louder. Puzzled we turned to see the trouble when suddenly out of the twilight appeared a good sized bear which ran right through our campsite clutching a bag of marshmallows in his mouth. Passing only a few feet from us we watched agape as he rushed out of sight.

Not very long afterwards a couple of park rangers came by and asked if we’d seen a bear. Dutifully we reported our brief glimpses and they continued tracking the miscreant. Afterwards we always referred to this vacation as our “bear trip”. For all that it was a much needed trip which recharged us and provided the family with a useful unspoken reference that put a number incidents in perspective in the following years.

Pages:
«« previous page 1 2

Tags: family

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

this article with others.