One day, some three years back, a couple of friends and myself
decided it would be fun to take a little backpacking trip out to the
middle of nowhere (Kananaskis Country, south and west of Longview, in
Alberta). The plan was to take the same
trail as we had once before (the trip with the sock incident), and
just go a little farther. So we packed our gear, food, clothes, and of
course my trusty Pentax, and set off. We crossed many streams by
wading or by finding trees, and hiked a long way. We sat for lunch,
and continued on, noticing but not really registering the significance
of overturned rocks, messed up ant hills, and bear dung. It began to
get late, so we ate our evening meal of chili and moved on up several
hundred meters to find ourselves a campsite. Having setup camp and
hung our food over a cliff (there where no exceptionally handy trees
of any great height), we bedded down for the night. We told jokes and
made rude noises, as is so often done on camping trips, and eventually
fell asleep.
Around midnight, by a buddies watch, we awoke with an feeling of
dread to the sound of something sniffing at our tent. Not knowing what
this manner of creature this may be not 4 feet from our heads, we lay
there quaking in our sleeping bags, till courage enough took us to
making noise to try to scare what ever it was away. We heard feet
moving around us, and we hit at the side of the tent, and make fierce
sounds, till a gallop carried the source of the sounds some distance
from us. Courage (or adrenaline, and maybe testosterone) took us, and
we open the flaps of the tent and peered into the darkness, to see
what manner of beast had come to rouse us from our sleep.
There, not twenty feet from the front of our tent, stood a small
black bear. Not one to waste a photo op, I grabbed for my camera and
tried to take a picture. Alas, it being midnight(!) and the
moon none to bright, I could get nothing on the light meter, and no
picture of our tormenter. My friends thought I was crazy (and will
still testify to this fact), but truly taking a picture was my first
impulse upon glimpsing the bear.
We spent the next minutes shaking in our boots and making as much
noise as possible, in hopes of scaring the bear away. I was sad that I
didn't get a picture. We did finally sleep again, and never heard from
the bear again.
It's darn lucky
that we (mostly) knew what we were doing, in not keeping food or anything
tasty (other than ourselves) inside our tent. I'm also really glad we
didn't eat dinner at our final campsite, for that my have been a very
large error. In retrospect, the signs of bear were clear, and it would
have been much smarter to stay clear of its territory. But that
wouldn't have made as good a story.