"they look a lot like the CA flag"
How I did it: i discovered real camping late in life. as a kid my parents never took us anywhere, no vacations of any sort. i grew up in the midwest. there weren't a lot of bears in milwaukee. in my 20's all my friends were club kids and musicians, a lot of us didn't have cars and rarely left the city (chicago or san fran). but as my mobility expanded along with my encounters and love of nature, it was bound to happen that i decided i wanted to see a real bear live. i first set the intention during a 4th of july camping trip at lake tahoe. it was one of those situations that reminded me a lot of my lackluster whale watching attempts, only i would turn my head one way and someone would shout out "look over there, a bear!" i literally was changing clothes in the tent when a bunch of ruckus started and a woman was screaming "bear, bear!" -- she had carelessly left food out at her site. my friend anup who had joined us on the trip just for kicks, came back after running to the noise with great tales of seeing the bear rise up on its rear legs before running off. urgh! so i set up another camping trip later that year at yosemite. this time i was determined. my first night, we stayed in the some of the cabins, and it was pretty populated, so they could have been wandering around me at night, but i didn't see or hear anything. however, the next day, going back to my car, i saw a few unfortunate car doors that had been ripped off by bears trying to get some snacks. some people just don't heed the signs. the second night, i was sure this was it. we had switched sites to a little less populated spot where we would be setting up our own tents. although it was lights out at 10, we decided we would stay up as late as it took to see the bears. sure enough, around 11:30pm or so, we could hear noises and off in the distance, i saw my first bears. they were huge and lumbering and rummaging through trash. i kept my distance and just watched. they were lit up by some nearby restroom lights and in total i saw maybe 5, 6. i was pretty elated.
Lessons & tips: i am actually more educated now on how damaging to the ecosystem such access to human food has on the black bear population. while it may cause a bit of excitement for a city girl like me, relying on human food changes the bear's behavior, causing them to be more nocturnal, more confrontational. and endangering their safety as parks see the need to kill bears that have unfortunate encounters with humans. ideally, i would love to just be in the wild outback, and see a bear from afar, safely. this happened to my friend last fall where he had a scary bear encounter on a nature preserve. he was alone, the bear was maybe 30 feet from him and he just got as tall as he could and screamed really loud, waving his arms to and fro. he said he was very afraid for his life since the bear was a female with 2 cubs and looked as if it were to charge right at him. it ended up heading off to the side, so i think he did the right thing.
Resources: if you are camping, my advice is to not encourage bears to come to you by luring them with food, it could be dangerous for you and sadly, it could get the bear killed. if you are planning on hiking somewhere remote, make sure you are making noise along the way so as not to surprise a bear, as silly as that sounds.
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Sep 12, 2008, 12:22PM PDT
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