Waking up to Bears on the Final Morning in Camp

       On the final morning of our time in the wilderness, I was rudely awakened by an elbow to the ribs.  “Kevin, there’s a bear.”  Maybe thirty seconds later, another elbow to the ribs.  “Kevin, there are two bears.”  This second warning caught my attention, and I bolted upright to look outside the tent.  Sure enough, there were two bears about 80 yards across the bench we had been camped on.  They seemed oblivious to us, intent on eating roots and shoots from the newly snow-free hillside.

       We got up and out of bed, and decide to wander upwind from these bruins, just to make sure they knew we were here.  Sure enough, as soon as we got upwind - still a good 80 yards distant - they stood up on their hind legs and sniffed in the air, while staring straight at us.  After a few seconds, the bears simply went back to eating.  Clearly, we posed no threat.

      The tricky part, of course, was that we had a 12 noon appointment at the airstrip, which we dared not miss.  And these two hairy visitors were hanging out right next to our bear canister.  At one point they even walked right past the canister, until one of them saw it out of the corner of their eye, and began to bat it around like it was a soccer ball.

      We packed up our gear from the tent, and then took down the tent, with one eye on the bears at all times.  As the tent went limp and ruffled noisily in the breeze, the noise seemed to startle the bears, and they moved 15-20 yards further away.  We ultimately used this annoying sound to our advantage, pressuring the bears to move further and further away from our canister until we could safely retrieve it and high-tail it to the airstrip.  All in all, we spent almost 90 minutes with the bears that morning.  We watched them for about 89 of those minutes, and they watched us for no more than 89 seconds.