Bear With Me...

I used to camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains quite a bit when I lived in California. Yosemite was just a two hour drive away from where I lived and I worked with people who had a lot of backpacking experience in that great park.

My coworker Johnny Mayer had been hiking and camping in Yosemite since he was a youth, having grown up in the Bay Area. He had a deep phobia about bears due to many bear encounters over the years. He never mentioned any specific event, like having his leg gnawed off by a hungry bear or anything like that, but he was truly bear phobic, right up to the point of being paranoid about bears. Yet he backpacked in Yosemite frequently.

A group of six of us decided to hike up to the Ten Lakes area one weekend. Drive up Friday after work, get up early Saturday, hike to the lakes, then hike out on Saturday.

We didn’t see any bears on the trail, but we did see evidence that they were there. Euphemistically called “Bear sign” that’s just the polite way of saying “Bear scat”, which answers the old question about what bears actually do in the woods.

Since we were new to backpacking my wife and I brought a tube tent with us. It was a large piece of thin plastic sheeting formed into a tube - lightweight, simple and easy to set up - run a rope through it, tie the ends of the rope to two trees, put some rocks inside and your tube becomes a triangular shaped tent. An elegent solution to outdoor housing.

That evening we gathered around the campfire, watched the satellites pass overhead and talked as we sat under the Milky Way. Talk turned, as it must, to bears.

Cindy Smith’s father, an old timer who had to be close to 60 years old, told us the most important thing one must know about bears. “Bears know what you are thinking” said the wise old man, and from then on we were privy to the inner workings of the ursine mind.

One of my coworkers claimed that his sense of smell was so good that when he walked in the woods he could smell the bears. I suppose that hyperosmia is something that some people have, but I can only imagine what that would be like. I much prefer the opposite.

We have all heard about how well dogs smell, well, other than wet dogs, that is. They have forty to fifty times as many olfactory receptors than humans and a much more complex olfactory structures in their snouts - maxiloturbinates combined with their respiratory epithelium allow them smell and process odors too faint for humans to detect. A large portion of their brain is devoted to processing what they smell and they have many connections between their olfactory bulb and their brain.

Some suggest that dogs noses are from 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more powerful than humans. Pretty darned powerful, eh? Well, it turns out that bears are even better than that - from 10 to 100 times better than dogs.

That suggests that bears know the very moment that you step into their woods. Forget about the aftershave or cologne you slapped on this morning, they can smell what you had for supper last night.

So we go traipsing into the High Sierras carrying food enough for the weekend and the bears think “Mmm, peanut butter and jelly time!”

Our guides told us “Tie your packs up in the trees to prevent the bears from eating your food!” Great advice that sometimes works. Depending on where you are, what size and type of tree you have available, that gives your breakfast a fighting chance of being there in the morning.

Of course, bears are smart, too. They can figure out the ropes and follow them to where they are anchored. Goodbye foodstuffs!

Our first few trips up into the back country we did okay - either the bears were vacationing in the low country or were stuffed from eating the goodies brought in by earlier hikers. In any case, we were able to hike in, secure our food in the trees, eat said food the next day, and hike out.

One time we hiked into Little Yosemite Valley, up a steep trail next to Vernal and Nevada Falls, right next to Half Dome. It is a great destination, not too far from the valley floor. We hiked in, set up our tent, and proceeded to tie our food up on a steel cable provided by the park service. That is a nice amenity, one I highly recommend to any travelers in that area.

A solo woman hiker arrived right after us and since it was a hot day, she decided to set down her pack and walk over to the Merced river to cool off. Well, there’s a rookie mistake if I ever saw one. No sooner did she get out of sight of her pack than it was set upon by a momma bear who greatly appreciated the Door Dash aspect of free food, delivered right to her house!

She, the bear that is, grabbed the pack in her mighty jaws and instantly climbed the nearest tree - a Ponderorsa pine, as I recall, eased her way out onto the lowest limb and started sorting through the goodies. Hmm, chocolate bar - yum, gone, wrapper and all in one gulp.

Next up, packaged food, some of which succumbed to tooth and claw, and any non-nutritious portions were tossed aside without a care. Tins were punctured, juice containers were crushed in the mighty mandibles, and generally, the bear was having a big time. You could practically see the joy on her face.

The human, not so much. She came back from the river and was livid! She grabbed rocks and started throwing them at the bear. The bear was all like “You throw like a girl, leave me alone, I am eating here!” I felt bad for the woman, but what are you going to do. Experience is a harsh master, and there were many lessons learned that day, my friend.

Those of us at the campsite got together, contributed what meager resources we could spare to sustain her overnight, and thereby staved off her collapse from malnutrition.

Of course, then the cubs showed up - hey, what’s going on? Is there food? We smell food! We like food!

One of them scampered into our tent and grabbed my pillow and ran out with it. He shook it a bit, then tossed it aside, not tasty! I still have that pillow, fifty years later. Why? Damned if I know, but it’s got a cool story behind it - how many of your pillows have been carried around by a wild bear cub? Very few of them, I daresay!

Of course during the night, the bears returned looking for scraps left over by messy humans. I can still remember lying in my sleeping bag listening to a large bear walking around the tent sniffing for food. Good thing I had a nice sheet of 4 mil plastic between me and the bear - with anything thinner than that I might have been in danger!

The next day on a day hike I encountered the local park ranger. Ranger Smith was his name, I think. He hated bears. He had a little campsite apart from the tourists, and it was surrounded by an electric fence. What? Yep, somehow he was resupplied with 12 volt car batteries to keep his fence powered up and the bears out of his food. That boy was attitudinous. We were standing there talking and a bear started shuffling up the trail towards us. He grabbed a rock the size of a baseball and hurled it at the bear, striking him right in the the forehead. Smack between the eyes.

I was amazed. Here we are, standing in the open, unarmed, and this lunatic decides it is a good idea to heave a rock at a wild animal with nothing between us and a potentially enraged 400 pound beast with fangs and claws. What the hey?

The bear, stunned, kind of squatted back on his hindquarters, stopped, and to my surprise, reversed course and went back the way he had come from. Holy schnike! What just happened? This boy is crazy and I can’t wait to get back to civilization where bears get some respect!

Johnny Mayer responded to his time in bear country by becoming bear-phobic. My response was to carve bears out of wood - perhaps if I made enough bear totems I would be protected from any harmful interactions with Ursus americanus. I carved big bears, small bears, small carvings of baby bears, and just about any kind of bear I could think of. I gave them away and only have a couple left around the house, just in case. I think they are working as I haven’t seen a bear in my neighborhood in the 15 years I have been here. I assume that most of the carvings I gave away are lost, strayed or stolen. Perhaps they have been thrown into the fire and joined with the Great Spirit Bear in the sky. I was carving one at work during my lunch hour and someone stole it. It was suggested that was a positive review of my work. Whatevs.

I signed up for a sculpture class at West Valley Junior College and hauled some nice white pine (Pinus strobus) planks into the classroom. Using their bandsaw I sawed out the two blanks that I laminated to make the bear. The teacher was a minimalist, which is a school of sculpture that values non-representational shapes of uniform shape and size, preferably displayed on a horizontal plane. The teacher was very dismissive of my plans to carve a bear, I guess he figured it would turn out to be a terrible amateurish mess, who knows? But I fooled him. Knowing what school of art he favored I went ahead, carved and sanded my pine bear, but rather than turning in the finished bear sculpture (see above) I told him that my work consisted of the pine chips on the floor, neatly arrayed and squashed flat under foot. He saw me working and I got an A in that class.

In the 1980s I took my kids camping in Yosemite and for years they had heard my bear tales. I impressed upon them that the bears could smell food in the trunk of our rental Lincoln and they might pry it open, which could negatively impact my relationship with the rental company. I told them that the bears were massive, strong and smart. And, of course, I emphasized that above all, bears know what you are thinking. Some stories have to be passed on down through the generations.

Imagine my disappointment when we set up camp and not only did we not see a single bear, but when I learned that the Park Service had actively been shooting and relocating the bears due to “negative interactions with humans”. Hello, we are in their house, what the heck do you expect a bear to do? I was, and still am, angry at how they treated my bear buddies. Very cruel.

Anyway, my sons and I hiked the Mist Trail, which that time of years was running heavy with water from the waterfalls which were at peak melt season, and my youngest son practically sprinted up the stairs carved from the living rock. I straggled up behind, looking like a drowned rat, grumbling about how did these steps get so steep, they weren’t this steep last time, we got to the top and watched the tourons swimming, yep, swimming in the Merced river just above a thousand foot waterfall. I stayed on the safe side of the railing. And, for the record, I didn’t see anyone swept to their death.

I had other hiking adventures, including a 22 mile out and back in two days starting at Hetch Hetchy. The trail gained altitude at an alarming rate using steep switchbacks right up from the edge of the reservoir. Something happened, I don’t remember what, but instead of staying in our camp for a day we turned right around and came back down. We drove out of the park, stopped at my cousin’s place, Buck Meadows, and drank all the water and soda pop we could. But no bears were seen that weekend. More’s the pity - I have become quite the fan of bears.

Key point - grizzly bears are extinct in California, and have been for decades. The bears I encountered considered my food to be food. Grizzlies consider humans to be food. Big difference.

Beniamino Bufano carved some nice bears: