Close Encounters of the Grizzly Kind

Autumn seems to have arrived in the Rocky Mountains. There is a chill in the air now and a kind of freshness that hasn’t been there earlier and the days are noticeably shorter. Though this weekend was sunny and absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, it wasn’t as warm as the last few weeks.

We’ve had a pretty good weekend so far. Nobody has been evicted, and no complaints of noise or people leaving upset with their camping neighbours, so that is good. One fellow did fall off the end of a picnic table and hit his head on a rock resulting in a large gash above his eye. I happened to be driving by and had my first aid kit with me so was able to clean the wound and put a bandage on it. He really should have gotten stitches, but he didn’t want to go to Canmore for that so that’s about all I could do. One of the girls had crazy glue with her and closed the cut with that so hopefully it won’t leave a big scar.

Tom is making our usual Sunday morning breakfast of sausage or bacon and pancakes over the fire. He really enjoys the challenge of getting the pancakes to a nice golden brown without burning them… it’s not so easy on a cast iron grill over an open fire. He does a really good job though.

The two pictures at the left show the backside of the Big Sister (is that her butt crack???) Anyway, it's a popular mountain to climb. One day we got out the huge telescopic lens that Tom gave me for my camera and tried to take pictures of people at the top. Turned out not too bad for such a huge distance. You can see the two people standing right on the ridge. Sometimes, with the binoculars, we can see half a dozen or more people who have climbed to the top and are celebrating their success.

We went for a little drive today down to Mount Shark. The mountain actually looks like a big shark fin sticking up into the air. We thought maybe we’d see the grizzly that has been hanging around on the other side of the lake. I saw him when I went down to Boulton Creek on Friday so we know he’s still feeding on the berries on that stretch of road. We didn’t see him, but it turns out we did encounter a grizzly bear a little later in the day right in our campground.

Tom and I were on the way back from cleaning some sites at the end of the campground and there he was, Ursa Horribilus, walking down the road toward us. We followed him for a bit…he didn’t seem scared of us at all and really seemed to be content wandering down the road enjoying the berries along the edge. We had to call conservation though so they would come up to shoo him out of the campground. By the time Josh, the CO, got here, the bear was in an open area near our registration booth. People driving by could see him and stopped to watch so there was a bit of a crowd gathered. Tom and I had to get them all back in their vehicles and into their campsites if they were close because the CO was going to set off a “bear banger”. It’s a device that sounds like a shotgun blast and scares the animals away. One stupid woman had got out of her car and was walking toward the grizzly…she was probably only about 30 feet away from it trying to get a good picture (no, it wasn’t me!)…the CO got her out of there as soon as he saw her. When he set off the bear banger there was no telling in which way the grizzly would run so the CO didn’t want to take any chances having people in the area. As it was the bear ran up into the bush toward the hiking trail. The trail is really popular and there were several groups on their way down. One group ended up seeing the grizzly up close and personal and were a bit shaken by it. Everyone got down the trail safely though and the CO trailed the bear as it made its way to the end of the campground. It was very cool to see the bear and even more interesting to see how the CO dealt with it. One of the things he did was to yell at the bear “go away”, “go away”. It may sound funny, but that’s the way they condition the bears…a couple “go away’s” and then the bear banger. The bears begin to understand and often will leave before the banger is needed just by being told to go away. Wonder if they can teach them to fetch too!!