Summer in Review: Bear Compliance and the Resulting Terror in the Night.

Summer is over. Looking back I can hardly tell where it has all gone. Not that I'm complaining mind you, my bank account is full again and I had a good time. However, it is time now to return to the world populated by people, which brings greater challenges, for me, than this summer has delivered. Still there are a few interesting highlights from this summer that I will share.

Work was more enjoyable this summer, but less rewarding. I know that doesn't make any sense. Hear me out. Early in the summer one of the local powers in the NPS began to initiate some changes in the process of doing things. Going into detail would be as boring for you as it was for me, so I'll try to explain succinctly. In short, my crew was ordered to do more paperwork (less work) and several of the planned work projects were removed from our schedule. Thus the summer was spent doing pointless projects that delivered no
sense of real accomplishment. We spent a lot of time out in the woods this summer, but I feel as if we did very little (as opposed to last summer when we worked our fingers to the bone). Anyway, it was still fun, and I got to see a lot of new country, but there was always a sense of conflict between the actual work crews and the administration. That = LAME.

BEARS were less plentiful than I saw last summer; I only saw one close, one from a medium distance (both black), and two from an airplane (both grizzlies and far away). Anyway, the real story comes from the last month of work. Several weeks ago I was in a crew of three that was sent to a remote pass in the mountains to work on an airstrip. While we were out there a group of five or six, led by a guide, showed up. At first they were friendly, but the next morning they were upset that we were using power tools to work on the runway (a ridiculous and stupid sentiment if you ask me) the guide also snooped around our camp and complained that we weren't "bear compliant." A video was recorded and sent to the local park ranger. While there really was nothing wrong with our camp sight and we were working close enough to it that bears weren't a threat anyway, the complaint put my crew on the radar of the administration. Not a good thing. The week later one of our crew had his gear raided by a grizzly bear as he waited for his flight out of another location. This resulted in another complaint, an official investigation, and an interesting series of lectures presented before my last trip of the summer. The lectures included several thinly veiled threats about job security, several drunk driving analogies, and several references to experiencing the feel of someone else's brains in your hands, oh, and about two hours worth of stories about people getting their chest cavities ripped out, and faces/heads ripped off. In short, bears are just short of immortal demi-gods who wander the Earth searching for victims. They possess insurmountable strength, keen intelligence, the speed of a car cruising just under the speed limit, and the devil's own temper. Oh yeah, they're bulletproof, and can bite through your skull like a fat boy bites through a German chocolate cake.

After that we were finally provided adequate bear safe food storage (which had not been provided by the admin before and was the core of the issue) and we were sent out into the woods to do what we normally do.

The next evening after a reasonably good day of work we all gathered around our campfire ate dinner and commenced with our evening's conversation. Naturally talk tended to always return to a certain, gory, theme. This conversation lasted for a couple hours as the light gradually faded and grew more and more sinister. At one point several of us heard a strange sound in the distance, but it faded away before the entire group grew silent. I had heard similar sounds emitted by ravens earlier in the summer and said as much. The conversation continued. After a short period of time the sound came again and conversation immediately stopped. It sounded like a person alternately talking and then screaming in the distance. An eerie silence followed and we all looked at each other in confusion. Then in the absolute silence that followed the sound came again, and this time there was no mistaking it. It was a woman screaming in mortified terror and pain. I can still almost hear words in her scream. We all knew, at that moment, that our worst fear were realized. All eight of us sprang into action gathering shotgun, satellite phone, bear mace, and such. At the same time a few people began calling into the stillness trying to establish contact. There was no reply. I have never heard such deathly silence. We broke into groups. Four of us went straight towards where we thought the sound was coming from while the other four (myself included) raced down the only trail in the area on ATVs hoping to intercept anybody that might be in the area (there would be no reason for anybody to leave the trail at this point). Nobody found anything and we never heard the sound again. We all returned to camp, all of us were obviously on edge and creeped out. I was the first to offer an alternate option because I have read that mountain lions sound, at times, exactly like a woman screaming. Only a few people considered this to be a viable option. The chief concern with this was that mountain lions don't live in Alaska, but I was able to dispute this point because I have seen one before (have I told that story). Anyway, gradually my theory won over, and was possibly verified when we heard the sound six days later in the early morning.

Still, none of us slept very well for several days after that.

If it was a mountain lion I have to say that they produce the creepiest and most horrifying sound imaginable to a man. Just think back to any horror movie that you have ever seen and recall the screams of the helpless girl characters that are pulled into the darkness by an unknown terror. It was that scream.


That's right, any demi-god abilities that bears lack, these guys have. They're a blend between ninjas and Nazgul. Just don't pee your pants when you hear one of these scream in the night.

Bear Encounters II

I think I might have a superpower; I can sense bears with my sixth or seventh sense. While I was camping for work last week there were several times that I had thoughts like I am going to see a bear tonight, or There is a bear outside my tent. I only get these random thoughts when I am isolated; if I'm in a group of people I am oblivious as anybody when it comes to the presence of my bear friends. But when I am alone, my extra senses kick into high gear. When I had thoughts like those I mentioned above, I was right.

So the first example of this. . . I was alone at our camp and I knew I was going to see a bear. Sure enough, at one point I turned around from what I was doing and there was a black shadow several hundred yards away among the trees. I knew it was a bear before it even moved. It turned out to be a pretty big black bear and he wandered closer to camp, pretty much ignoring me. He didn't actually come into our camp, which would have made things very hairy--me being by myself and all--but he did come pretty close.

The next day I was in my tent reading when I sensed a bear outside my tent. Three different times I looked out my little plastic window and couldn't see anything. Finally, I poked my head out of my rain fly, and there was a little black bear chewing on the berries not fifty feet in front of me. I watched him munching for a little bit, and he ignored me, which I consider to be a good thing.

Anyway, when I get feelings like this, I am always correct. I think it works with any living creature, but bears are fairly easy for me to sense.

One time, when I was young and afraid of bears (because I had read Alaskan Bear Tales), my family was living in a little cabin. I woke in the middle of the night, terrified, because I KNEW there was a bear outside. Nobody believed me, though my mom did get up and look out the windows, but she didn't see anything. The next day, there were fresh bear tracks everywhere.

That's just one of my superpowers though. I have many, many others.

May Creek

I haven't talked much about working for the NPS lately. Basically it was all I was talking about on my blog. . . boring. However, I think I will mention my latest excursion into the bush. This time we went to a place called May Creek which can only be reached by plane. Here is the only real picture that I could find on the net of May Creek.

This is the airfield, which I must add is pretty snazzy; it's almost a mile long. . . long enough for a C-130 to land on.

First of all, flying on a bush plane. AWESOME! We flew in on a Beaver, built by de Havilland in 1948. It's serial number was like 38 or something like that. . . the plane was a classic. The cool thing that I noticed about flying in a bush plane was that we only flew at an altitude of 3000 feet, meaning that we flew between the mountains instead of above them. It was pretty awesome to look out your window and watch the mountains sliding by, or being able to pick out individual trees on the ground below. Cool stuff. I've decided that I still wish to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a pilot and will, at some point in my future, when I am rich, buy myself an airplane to facilitate the fulfillment of this dream.

We touched down on the Airstrip, unloaded our gear and then reloaded it on a couple ATV's and proceeded to our cabin. One of the first things I noticed on the way was a big fat pile of red pooh. Bear pooh. The area is berry heaven, and therefore bear central. It seems bears don't really get that much from berries, they shoot right through their digestive system, so the pooh was about as abundant as the berries. EVERYWHERE!

We had a cabin, complete with woodstove, propane, and solar power for the lights, and a sweet outhouse. Yes, we were living the high life.

Work was typical for the next week; rainy, which wasn't too bad because we knew that we had a warm dry place to go after work. I spent most of my time working a chainsaw, and swamping (dragging what we cut off the trails into the woods), not that fun, but not really all that bad either.

It may have been day two or three when I saw three bears, a mother and two cubs crossing the airfield. They sure took their time, and didn't even pay any attention to us. One of the cubs, after they crossed, darted back out of the woods and wrastled one of the orange traffic cones that outlined the runway for a few minutes before mama got him back on track. That was my only notable bear encounter. The rest of the crew had their own encounters at some point, and I would wager that we had upwards of 10 encounters/sightings of different bears among the whole crew. Some of the guys had their coats hanging under a weather port, and a bear shredded them a bit. I was with a group that startled another. We never saw it, but we heard it scramble down an embankment and then were able to track where it had sprinted down the trail ahead of us. There were tons of bears, but thankfully, there were no. . . physical. . . encounters.

There was also a wolf that was scouting our cabin, but I only caught flashes of him moving through the woods. I've seen them before, but it still blows me away how ghostlike wolves can be. . . or any other predatory animal for that matter.

On a different note, because we are a group of hairy Alaskan men, we naturally gravitate towards competition, and in honor of the Olympics, we had our own version right there in May Creek. Our events were things like: left handed football toss, free-standing ladder climb, the ladder hop, horseshoes, and the May Creek Mile (run on the Airstrip). I can't say that I did particularly well in any event, though I did have a pretty sweet stall in the freestanding ladder climb, showing a dancer's balance, but I wasn't high enough enough to win--the typical technique was to scramble up as the ladder was falling. Bah! Where is the poise? The control?

The mile was a beast! I have not run since high school basketball, but I still beat my previous fastest time by seven seconds. . . which isn't saying much, I'm not a fast runner.

We flew out on Sunday, and while waiting for our plane, a group of us hiked up the trail towards the old Chititu gold mine and did some gold panning above some falls; cleaning out a seam in the bedrock. Of course this included a pretty hairy crossing of the Chititu, which was quite fast and muddy. We found some color, and a copper nugget, in about an hour of panning. What could we have found with a full day, and a shovel?

Anyway, those are the highlights of a pretty fun trip. Alaska rocks! Even if it is a bit cold and rainy this summer. And, someday I will own a digital camera so I can capture at least some of these moments on film.

Bears and Bear Tales

My sister wrote an excellent story on her blog about being hunted by wolves (http://www.shadowsnatcher.blogspot.com/), which inspired me to write about my first bear encounter.

When I was about eleven or twelve I was somehow exposed to the book Alaskan Bear Tales by Larry Kaniut (an excellent but at times rather morbid book). I was fascinated by this book and could not put it down. Unfortunately, by the time that I was finished, my head was full of "and the bear's teeth grated against my skull like chalk against slate," which kind of starts to run away in the mind of an eleven year old boy.

So, it shouldn't have been any surprise that soon after I finished the book I had a very eerie dream. I was walking in the woods near where my family burned our garbage (you can do that in Alaska, there's no trash services around). The ground was mossy, and beams of sunlight filtered through the countless skeletal branches of spruce to light a small clearing in the trees. There in the center of the clearing was a cinnamon colored black bear. It was lying in the moss, watching me. And that is all I remember.

Two or three days later, I saw that bear in real life.

It was my job in the family--being the eldest and strongest son at home--to empty and burn the garbage. The problem began when I took the garbage out the previous evening, and for some reason (wind, wet, lazy), I didn't actually burn it. My family was--and still is--building a large house which at the time was just four concrete walls that we had poured for the basement. Surrounding our "construction site" were piles of various lumber, plywood, and insulation. The day after I had neglected my duty as a "garbage man," my father and I were engaged in some sort of productive activity around the house when my dad asked me to go get an item. As I made my way towards the pile of stuff--I think it was insulation--I heard a thrashing of branches from behind a deadfall near the garbage area. I stopped short. My dad noticed and called over to me and asked what I saw. I wasn't sure, I had just seen a flash of brown before the thing disappeared. I told him it was a "moose, or deer, or something," (deer don't live in Alaska by the way). About the time that I finished my sentence, it appeared hesitantly from behind the deadfall. It was a bear. At the time, I didn't notice that the bear was remarkably similar to the bear that had seen in my dream--my train of thought was more along the line of a female park ranger who had her arms gnawed off--but it was. A small cinnamon colored black bear was trying to get into the garbage that I had neglected the previous evening, and I had startled it. My exit strategy was to back away slowly before I sought the "safety" of four concrete walls with holes for windows and doors. My dad tends to tell people that I ran like a "scalded cat." Whatever.

By the time I felt safe (on top of a pile of plywood with my head poking over the wall), the bear had meandered nearer to the garbage and was eyeing it speculatively. My dad had ambled a little closer to get a good look. There was a moment of uncertainty on both sides before the bear changed its mind and wandered back into the forest. I exited the house and joined my dad as we paralleled the bear's path through the woods. The shocking thing was that even though we could see the bear in and out of the trees, the bear made no sound. It was like a ghost drifting through the forest, a dry and brittle forest which makes squirrels and rabbits sound like demons. But the large, heavy bear was deadly quiet. Soon after, it disappeared.

This was the first of my bear encounters, and it instilled in me a respect for a (sometimes) deadly animal that is large and powerful, but silent in its element. However, over time, my unfounded and childish fear of bears faded and was replaced by a certain. . . affinity for them. I view bears (and a certain falcon) as my "nature guardian" if that makes any sense.