Beary close encounters

Traveling together and camping saves young families a lot of money and provides a wealth of wonderful memories, especially when viewed through the rose-colored glasses of time as my husband does when he regales folks with his tales of encounters with bears in the mountains.

“My first experience with bears came when we (my father, mother, brothers, sisters and an adult friend) went traveling in a 1948 Buick Roadmaster. We were up in the Smokey Mountains, taking the Skyline drive. We stopped at the top of it to get out. My mother saw this bear cub by the side of the walkway, reaching up to the stones. She reached down and stroked its back. She later explained, “I just wanted to feel what the bear felt like.”

The family friend, following directly behind her, did not see an experience  happening but a live bear in contact with a person. “You should have seen his face when that bear cub turned with mouth open, obviously expecting to get food,” my husband said. “It’s a good thing we did not know where the mother bear was.”
Hubby took us to the Smokey Mountains when my daughter was still small enough for an infant seat. He asked several people, “Where can we see bears?”

“They said to go to the picnic tables near Chimney Rocks. We went there to have a little picnic. We were not fully set up for the picnic when a pretty good-sized bear came wandering down the road.
“We wanted to see bears, but not face-to-face.
“We rushed to the car,” he recalled.

We took a quick head count and realized we had left the baby in her little seat on the picnic table.
He went back to the table and grabbed her and the chair.
Then there was that time in the White Mountains.

He heard a woman scream something about “get out of here.”
“I thought the woman was yelling from the bathroom, telling it to get out,” he said. He assumed it was a bear because “no one yells at their kids like that in the morning.”

Later that day he walked by the fire line – the area where they cut the trees down to stop the spread of forest fires. “The people were there among the berries. I went up to them and said, ‘I heard you guys yelling.’”

They told him they had been shopping the previous day and the bear had gotten into their food. “He broke open the ice box, drank the milk, ate up the yogurt and touched the meat, but put it down without eating it,” they told him.
“I heard pounding. It sounded like you were hitting something with the shovel,” he said.

“Yes, we had this,” the other camper said as he held up a trench shovel. They were beating the table with that trying to get the bear to go.

“Don’t you realize how fast a bear can move?” he asked. “That can be dangerous.”
“Yeah, we realized that when he stood up,” he replied. “He was six feet tall. When he left, he rumbled away mostly on two feet. When he went down to four feet and began running they realized how fast he could move.

Hearing that story, my husband was sure that the night before it had been a bear that had knocked our ice chest off the red wagon we used for hauling kids. If so, that was the nearest we ever were to a bear. We had parked the wagon right beneath the beds of our tent trailer.

We thought it was the wind knocking the food chest over, but when we went outside the next morning and picked up the food chest, the mozzarella cheese balls were gone.

“I found the empty wrappers about 50 feet away from us. That bear liked dairy products,” my husband tells folks.
“The next night I set up a pyramid of pots and pans with a marshmallow underneath so I would hear it when the bear came. I thought I would take pictures.

“The bear came. The pans tumbled. We woke up. I saw that bear. It was walking on all fours, but its shoulders were still higher than the hood of the car.”

We never took any pictures – it was too dark, but the black silhouette sufficed to underscore its size.
In recent years he has traveled all the way to the Black Hills camping out with an adult son and never saw a bear. But during a visit to Fairfield Bay, Ark., with that same son, he watched the bears shamble up to the garbage collection corrals.

“The bears would come up to the bin, grab something and then move down the hill about 100 feet away to eat whatever they got. We stood on the road, on the edge of the woods watching them.”

The pictures may be few, but the memories are many – and worth it, as long as the bears remain too far away to pet.


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