We just got back from a 9-day trip to Yosemite National Forest and the Sequoia National Forest with the family.

From the moment you arrive at the park, every tourist is hammered with propaganda about bears. This is part of the appeal of traveling to Yosemite, of course, because we’re not predictable, lazy tourists, but brave souls that are venturing into the wild. Wherever there was a parking lot, there were signs that warned us to hide our food from the hungry hungry bears.

I thought the bear propaganda was excessive and tacky. But while standing in line at Camp Curry to register for the week, a 3-minute video looped on the televisions hanging from the ceiling: bears ripping off car doors, bears jumping into your car, bears dragging food out of your car. These were real bears with unlimited strength and shiny fur that bristled in under the light of the video camera at night. I got the point. No food in the cars. No food in the tent.


Bear Encounter 1

At about two in the morning on our first night in the park, I woke up to a grown man yelling “GET OUT OF HERE BEAR!” at the top of his lungs. I sprung out of bed and shook Dan to wake up. He and I rushed the screen door on the front of the tent. I lifted the flap and looked up and down the sidewalk that separated the rows of tents, barely visible in the dark of the night.

In between shouts from the bear-chaser, I heard shuffling of feet and popping of cots as other campers woke up to the commotion. But everyone remained silent, listening to see if the bear would come running through our stretch of tents. I could still hear his yells, except they went further and further away from the tents and into the forest. It was almost like a police siren fading as it disappears down the highway. I laid back down in bed and waited for an hour before I could go back to sleep.

Bear Encounter 2

On the third day in the park, Josh and I were riding our mountain bikes on a trail that passed by a campground. I was just cruising down the hill, listening to my gears click beneath me when Josh calmly said, “There’s a bear behind us.” My head spun back to see a young black bear trotting through the campground 100 yards away from the trail.

I cursed out of fear and we sped up and got out of there. I’ve never seen a black bear walk like that. It was just scooting along through the campground looking for a snack.


Bear Encounter 3

Near the end of our stay at Yosemite, we decided to join other campers around a fire in the forest for some smores. We hopped out of the SUV just after sunset and hit the trail for the short hike to the event. Even though there was plenty of light in the sky, the forest got dark with every step.

After 100 yards, it was as dark as midnight. We stood at a fork in the trail, and John and I disagreed which path would take us to the campfire circle. I knew that it was right, John insisted it was left because he could see the fire. The fire he saw was actually a light hanging on a post near a bathroom. It had that palish yellow-white light that hums. Campfires don’t hover 10 feet of the ground on a tree without branches.

John started walking left anyway. At this point, I knew things could only get worse and I should probably just join John. But what good would it be to follow him to the wrong place? Soon the darkness of the forest swallowed Dan and John and it was just our group walking right: Me, Rhonda, Josh, Matt, Carolyne, Lauryn, and Candyce. I could sense the girls getting nervous after a few minutes, so I comforted them by telling jokes and recalling the familiarity of the path that we were on. How could they not recognize this, we hiked it two days before? In a few seconds of silence between my jokes, Rhonda and Candyce snapped and said they got a bad feeling, that it was time to turn around.

I didn’t want to argue with the mother, so I nodded and said it was time to go back. My defeat was short lived, because seconds later, Carolyne screamed when a big black shadow walked across our path 15 feet ahead of us. Sh!t it was a bear.

I told them to stay close together, grabbed the whistle from Rhonda, and stepped forward blowin’ the whistle and throwing rocks. Candyce was right behind me yelling like a mad woman. The clan started praying out loud. Fifteen-year-old Josh let go of his mom and stooped to the ground to pick up an rock and chucked it towards where the black shadow disappeared into the trees.

Back at the trail head, Danny came charging out of the woods and began reprimanding us before he caught his breath. “Why were you guys making such a scene! Blowing that whistle like that? You were freaking out the campers down there!” I explained that we ran into a bear in the woods, he was jealous that he chose the left. They ended up next to a campground bathroom.

(For the record, I rode my bike on that same trail a day later, and we were less than 100 yards away from the campfire. But by that time, the smores were gone and so were the campers. They knew that they had to get out of the woods before the bears came out.)

This Sounds Familiar

Last summer we spent a night in San Antonio after a week at Mustang Island off the coast of Texas. We were walking in a slightly sketchy block between the riverwalk and our 5-star hotel, and Lauryn began freaking out, crying out of fear. This launched a big debate on the sidewalk about whether or not we were in a safe part of town. Yeah, it was dark and we were walking next to a boarded-up storefront. That might seem scarey for people who watch too much TV, but I refused to believe that that alone meant we’d get mugged. Fifty paces behind us was a tourist wonderland, and fifty paces forward was a plush hotel. I could see gleaming Mercedes pulling into the hotel’s valet entrance.

The next morning I come to find out that someone was stabbed outside a bar 20 feet from the sidewalk where we had our debate about safety on the streets of San Antonio. Now, my guess is that that dude got stabbed because he and knife-boy were both drunk and brawling inside the bar. I doubt he’d keep rolling down the street looking for someone else to stab, perhaps a family of 11, 4 of which were grown men. I dismissed Lauryn’s episode as coincidental, and I haven’t thought about it much sense.

Back in Yosemite, I doubt that black bear in the woods would’ve attacked us. I later learned that it’s rare that a black bear will ever attack a human. Grizzly bears, polar bears, Kodiak bears–they’ll mess you up. But black bears are less aggressive. So we weren’t facing any real danger, but I can’t dismiss the girls freaking out as just girls freaking out. They were right.

Bear Encounter 4

I’ll write about this later. I’m tired of writing.

In summary, here are other animals that may or may not have tried to eat me:

  1. Bobcat – 10 feet away from me and Lauryn. Pretty scary.
  2. Coyote – taking a dump beneath a tree where 5 crows heckled him.
  3. Mule deer – don’t look like mules, bucks look cool.
  4. Squirrels – the real entertainers of the forest, friend to all Asian photographers.