Fear is a Black Bear

I have returned from Yosemite, alive and well. Last Saturday night, actually. It's just taken me a couple of days to recuperate from my 9 days away from home (first San Diego, then to Yosemite). As Mark says, I had to take a vacation from my vacation.

So Yosemite was, in a word, awesome. A lot of interesting things happened that I'm sure you'd like to read about, so I'll indulge you with my retelling of some of them.

In the days leading up to the trip, Pam and I had considered doing a test run of putting the tent together that we bought about a month ago, just to make sure we could do it when we got there and that we wouldn't be forced to sleep in the car. But, we figured we're both smart people, what's the risk really? So arrive at the camp site we did at about 11:30 or so. A beautiful camp site, by the way - #28 at the White Wolf campground. Much more isolated from the other campsites, bounded by a babbling brook in the back, surrounded on three sides by trees, with a perfectly sized flat space for our tent inbetween several of them.

I get the box for the tent, which had always seemed incredibly light to me ("Wow, technology!" I had thought to myself when we first bought it), and I open it up and pour out the contents. Out comes what appeared to be a rather small amount of material. Out loud, I said to Pam, "This is going to become a tent???" We lay out the contents: a package of stakes and a big piece of nylon-like material, and begin to read the assembly directions. The first step entailed spreading the tent, door-side up, flat out on the ground. "Where's the door?" we ask. There is no door. In fact, there is no tent. There is NO TENT. The tent box contained only the stakes and the rain fly. So our entire first afternoon was spent driving down to the valley to buy another tent.

Day 2 was spent on an 8 mile, 5 hour hike down from Glacier Point that found us on a steep, often slippery and treacherous trail with waning daylight. We got back just as the sun disappeared. My legs were sore for the next several days after that one, but at least we survived!

On day 3, we woke up pretty late because the hike had just exhausted us. I got up to go to the bathroom (our camp site actually had flushing toilets, so we weren't completely roughing it). As I stepped out of the bathroom and turned the corner, I froze in my tracks. Right in front of me, no more than 15 feet away, was a black bear.

I stared at her, she stared at me. She opened her mouth for a few seconds, as if to say something, then closed it. Still keeping her eyes on me, she slowly, very slowly, began walking away. And I, now unfrozen, cautiously made my way back to the camp to inform Pam of my bear encounter, but she was already going after the bear herself, camera in hand.

We'll have the pictures back soon - hopefully she got one of her! Sorry to disappoint you, but the picture above I got off the internet. "But it looks brown!" you say. Well, yes - black bears can be black, but are often varying shades of brown. Our bear was brown.

It turns out that black bears are pretty prevalent at Yosemite. Our campsite, in particular, has several active bears living in the area. Lured by the food of careless travelers, these bears have learned to scavenge for food left out in the open or in cars. Bears can break into a car in 30 seconds (you can imagine how much time I spent fretting about my car each night!) if they smell food or see what looks like a food container. They are not, however, generally dangerous to humans. We found out there are more attacks on humans by deer at Yosemite than by bears.

But that didn't keep us from being on edge every night as we set out to cook dinner over the campfire, knowing that bears came to the campground every night looking for treats. Each night, from around 8 till 11, we'd hear occasional bursts of noise from different parts of the campground as people yelled and banged pots and pans to get bears out of their campsite. Up until then, bears had left our own campsite alone. But that night...

Well, I'll let Pam tell you more about it. I've asked her to make a guest blog, as she was practically right next to the bear as it came silently lumbering into our campsite that night. I'll just say that, in my shock and surprise at suddenly seeing a giant bear standing by our fire, I fished my car keys out of my pocket and, fumbling, I hit the panic button to maybe scare the bear away with my car alarm. Instead, I popped the trunk. I was such a hero.