Hey Bear! - Part 2 of 3
Random Encounters with Ursus Unexpecticus
You can find PART 1 of this story here.
Like many other hikers, I’ve often seen bears below a trail feeding streamside on the fresh green veggies of spring, or in the meadows later in summer among the sweet and juicy blueberries and huckleberries we sometimes devour together in the wild, albeit at a distance. I’ve rambled around a bend on a forest trail and watched bears quickly scurry off. So when I say I’ve encountered a lot of bears, most are of this innocuous variety.
I do have a few more anecdotal snippets, however, that are a bit more memorable.
Around eight years ago, I was in Alaska to attend public meetings related to my job with a federal energy agency. I took a couple of days to visit some sites in the field, one of which was outside Valdez, Alaska. The weather was great and I wanted to car camp. I picked a place with skinny campsites along the road shoulder on the south shore of the Port of Valdez.
I’d passed the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery along the way and learned that coho salmon were returning from sea by the tens of thousands. You could watch them gathering en masse near the hatchery. Hundreds of millions of coho and pink salmon eggs are incubated here annually, then released as fry and smolt, making Solomon the largest such producer in North America (impacts on wild salmon are still debated). Thousands of seagulls were there for the show as well. Many of them would fly low to the water, against the current, then raft back down pecking and nibbling on those poor, heroic salmon. Even a sea otter drifted past feeding on a fish.
Bears, of course, love salmon no less than people do. I stopped along the road to watch several black bears chasing after these weighty fish in a small tributary. One lazy brute would immobilize a fish with a slap of the paw, take a big bite out of it, then wander a few paces and stomp on another. Half-chewed fish were scattered among the weeds, rocks and shallows like flotsam. These bums were being quite wasteful. No manners at all.
After watching for a short time, I realized what was happening. The bear was looking for eggs. When a clench of the jaw revealed such a delicacy, the bear gobbled the roe like, well, caviar. I only saw blacks here, but word was that both blacks and browns (grizzly) each had tickets to the feast.
Later, when I pulled into the campsite, I realized that it was just me and one other party who were tent camping. Everyone else brought an RV, including an amicable Australian family vacationing in a camper next to me. I enjoyed chatting with them into the evening, before finally noticing that everyone else had called it a night. It was after 11:00 pm already, yet still fairly light out.
I slithered into my sleeping bag and quickly dozed off. It was dark when I was awakened by a whole lot of splashing and grunting nearby. Clearly, a bear was chasing down a fish on the shore outside my tent. The water lapping the beach and the bear lapping the fish sounded a bit close for comfort. Unable to see beyond my nose, I reacted somewhat nervously at first, then remembered that I was people, and salmon offer bears a much finer entrée. I rolled over and soon drifted back to sleep to the lullabies of splashy-splashy and grunt-grunt.
When I awoke again around 5:00 am, it was already light out. I crawled from the security of my down bag and backpacking tent to find that the bears were gone and the other tenting party had already packed up and left. I felt a little smug, just me and my little tent, while everyone else was still cooped inside their heavily armored mackerel cans.
I spent the day driving north to the unpaved Denali Highway. Somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere, I found a little knoll off the road to pitch my tent for the night. No spawning salmon here, but this was surely brown bear country. I located the tent next to the car door, to grant myself a truly false sense of security. And slept like a rock.
In 1994, I took my folks and little brother to Alaska to see all the wildlife, and Denali, of course. At 70, my dad especially wanted to see a moose. He’d also been to every state but Alaska, so our trip had the added bonus of checking off his fiftieth state.
Ahead of a planned wildlife cruise, I’d dropped them off at a historic hotel in Seward and proceeded to the Exit Glacier to camp. I just wanted to see the place, if only briefly. Early the next morning, on the drive back to town, I caught up with a cow moose and calf ambling down the road. I swear the cow was eight feet tall. I crept along behind them in the rental car, before they finally got the message to get off the road and let me by.
After our enjoyable cruise out Resurrection Bay, we drove back to the Exit Glacier. My brother was ready with the video camera, but alas, no moosies. Sadly, our dad did not see a moose the entire trip.
We next headed to Denali National Park, where we would catch the shuttle bus to the semi-remote Eielson Visitor Center. We’d picked a perfect, mostly sunny day and the mountain gleamed before us. Telescopes were trained on a brown bear sow and cub a half-mile away near the river bottom. While the folks enjoyed a nice lunch break, I spotted a trail across the road climbing 900 feet to Thorofare Ridge. I headed up.
Once again, I’m the only person on the trail and am making some noise. Don’t want to surprise any bears. It’s open country to the top of the ridge, and the view was awesome. I wandered the ridge briefly to a broad, open flat with a few snow patches. I took a break there to gawk at the The Mountain and eat my own lunch. In the bugless silence, I began to hear rocks clattering below and behind me, opposite the slope I’d just ascended. The sound came closer and I’m now thinking maybe Dall sheep or something?
Rather than get up and look or head back down, I kept still and listened as the sound grew louder. In the next moment, a big rack of antlers rose into view, followed by its owner, a caribou, not ten yards away from me. The animal turned to look at the stunned human sitting there watching. In the next minute, a herd of thirty or more caribou stepped over the crest, many of them looking at me as they ambled toward a lingering snow bank. One by one, they all took a bite or two of snow and chomped away.
At that point, I couldn’t move and just sat there, savoring the encounter. They were in no hurry to go anywhere, but eventually turned around, retraced their hoof prints and disappeared down the mountain from the same direction they’d come. As did I, back to Eielson. Cautious for bears and anticipating sheep, I’d been surrounded by caribou. Whodathunk?
The story continues . . . PART 3