[/media-credit]An angry grizzly bear at close range: Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.
“A Trinidad woman was flown by helicopter late Friday to a hospital after she was mauled by a bear she tried to scare away from her house by clanging pots and pans.
Denver Post May 20, 2012″
What to do about bears?
Sometimes banging pots and pans works. Obviously, sometimes not. It’s worked for me a couple of times but I guess I’ll rethink that particular strategy. You never know what’s going to just piss a bear off.
Another photo editor and I were talking about bears the other day. Bears have been much in the news; the mauling in Trinidad; the images of tranquilized bears falling out of trees in Boulder and Steamboat Springs; the closure of some National Forest campgrounds to tent camping; the amazing images of a photographer/grizzly bear encounter in Yellowstone.
My co-worker has never seen a bear in the Colorado wild. A bear destroyed his tent and sleeping bag while he was out hiking a few years ago but as far as seeing an actual living breathing bruin. Zip. Nada. Zero.
So maybe he should hang out in the woods with me. Or not!
Bears appear in my life at weird and unpredictable times. They’re like phantoms. Now you see one. Now you don’t. Even when I’m looking right at one I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact of it.
“Shit! There’s a bear!”
Matter of fact — I saw a bear yesterday afternoon. Big as a horse (well that’s an exaggeration, but plenty big) black as night, poised with front paws on a boulder not far from my home in Conifer. The bear looked at me, gently slid off the boulder and vanished.
“Shit! There’s a bear!”
Bears have been interwoven in my personal history as far back as I can remember–in dreams and symbols and things—and of course, in person. My Mandan/Hidatsa friend Gerard Baker told me that my propensity towards bears happens because they are my spirit animal. Which explains a lot…and also complicates things. It’s like being told that lightening is your friend. Really?
My bear experiences have been mostly positive. Mostly. A sight I’ll never forget is a grizzly splashing across Pelican Creek in Yellowstone National Park, fur rippling, water spraying like shattered glass in dawn light. I’ve watched bears grubbing, grazing, eating berries, playing, ambling along with their cubs and just delightfully being bears. I’m always amazed at how active bears are, how constantly on the move–how fast they are.
On the not so mostly positive side an obnoxious black bear moved my family and I out of a camp in Desolation Canyon on the Green River one night. Quickly! The next morning the cold beer I was drinking when the bear arrived was still on the beach where I’d set it before piling everybody and everything into the raft and hastening across the river.
In Yellowstone I had a grizzly circle camp for an absurdly long and scary time; and my wife and I once spent a nervous night on Big Game Ridge because a grizzly and her two cubs decided to play “bat the bear” in the meadow below us.
“Bat the bear,” involves a cub running as hard as it can into its mother, getting swatted gently away with a paw and rolling ass over teakettle through the grass in a fuzzy ball.
PLEASE READ ON