Night of the Living Bear

I'm including the following events as a separate entry because the hours between nightfall on May 30 and the earliest part of May 31 turned into such an adventure that it felt like a whole separate day!

After dinner, Dan the Bear Man set up the bear snare behind the shelter. The snare consists of a clamp and a metal cable secured to a tree, all hidden with branches and baited with a can of tuna. Bear Man explained that bears love tuna, but that he sometimes uses bacon because bears are really attracted to that too. (As he was saying this, I realized with horror that my food bag contains several foil packets of tuna and a large shrink-wrapped package of pre-cooked bacon. Note to self: consider bringing some other forms of protein next time.)

The idea is, when the bear goes for the bait, the snare clamps his leg and restrains him long enough to be darted with a sedative. The drug makes him limp but still somewhat conscious. While in this compromised state, the bear gets tagged and measured. Since bears hate to be vulnerable and manhandled, the whole experience is hopefully so negative that the bear stays away from the area where all this occurs. However, if the bear does choose to keep coming back and posing a threat to hikers, the Park Service's only other option is to drug him again, and then physically relocate him to another part of the park! Picture four Park Service guys carrying a comatose bear on a stretcher, up and over miles of mountains. This really happens sometimes!

After the buildup of watching the snare being built and participating in all this bear talk, I was pretty nerved up. And all we had left to do all evening was sit around and wait for nightfall. I tried to read a book I had brought with me, but I found myself just sitting there staring at the (now flimsy-looking) chain link fence on our shelter, wondering what kind of force it could withstand. While we sat around, Bear Man passed around his night-vision goggles for us to look at. The goggles lent an eerie green cast to everything, but they really did provide amazing ability to see in the dark. It was especially cool to look up at the clear night sky and see zillions more stars than our normally feeble eyes are capable of noticing.

About dusk, two more Park Service guys showed up for the stakeout. They too would be spending the night at the shelter, to help with the bear. This was turning into quite a large-scale sting operation. All of us -- three Bear Men and six hikers -- burrowed into our sleeping bags about 9 p.m., wondering what the next few hours would bring. We heard coyotes howling as we were lying there trying to go to sleep.

I dozed until 11 p.m., when I suddenly heard Bear Man #2 frantically whispering: "DAN! DAN! DAN!" Apparently he had heard the snare activate. Dan and the other two Bear Men immediately jumped out of their sleeping bags and into their boots, and went trotting out back. All six hikers (including me) followed suit, headlamps beaming, to see a 350-pound black bear thrashing around in the snare and doing the best voice impression of Chewbacca that you've ever heard. They shot him with a dart full of sedative and he quieted down... for a moment. Then he started thrashing and yowling again. Another dart. Another brief moment of quiet. More thrashing. This cycle went on and on till they had used up seven darts -- the amount that would normally be used on a six hundred pound animal! None of the three Bear Men could figure out how the bear could stay that worked up with all that sedative in its system. They (and we) were relieved when he finally lay down and his breathing slowed a bit.



While the bear was sedated, we got to photograph him and touch him. His fur was very soft, like a dog, only longer.
Then the three Park Service guys went to work cooling him down. He had gotten so agitated during the sedation ordeal that his body temperature was quite high, and Bear Man was worried that this might result in a seizure. So we brought our water bottles and they started dumping cold water on his fur until he cooled off a bit. (For the record, the water bottle in this picture is the same one I drank out of during this trip!) Once his temperature was under control, the next task was to tag the bear's ear and take a whole bunch of measurements for the Park Service records. That's about the time I finally went to bed. It was a little past 1 a.m.

Once the sedative started wearing off and the bear came to, Bear Man and his friends basically ran him off, and he was glad to get the heck out of there. By then it was after 2:30 a.m. As far as we know, he didn't come back that night.