There is apparently a reason that people recommend having some sort of wilderness training before beginning an outdoor adventure in the wild. Common sense, one would think, would have told my friends and I that before we began our cross country journey last year. This trip of a lifetime would include several stays in a number of America’s national parks, including a 3-day backpacking adventure in Yosemite. This type of a voyage might have instilled in one a desire to learn about the wild, or perhaps an inherent need to learn even the most basic of survival skills. My friends and I? No chance. We prepared for this trip by spending a weekend at a K.O.A. in the outback of Eastern Pennsylvania, at least a full six-minute drive from the nearest Burger King. We prepared physically by hiking up to the peak of a 1,000 foot summit carrying one empty backpack (that we rotated among us) to simulate the weight we would be carrying. I thought reading a Bill Bryson book on his hike down the Appalachian Trail was all I needed to prepare me mentally… Really.
You ever have one of these walk towards you? Yeah, neither had we.
Our excessive amount of training came in handy on our second night in Yosemite. The three of us had hiked approximately fifteen miles from our parked car (if we were reading the map properly, which is definitely not a given) and had a camping permit from the Park Service that said we could set up a tent wherever we wanted. We, of course, sought out locations as isolated as possible… a test of manhood, if you will. Our tent was pitched and we were sitting around waiting for boiled drinking water to cool, when the sound of branches breaking could be heard about a hundred feet from our tent. We had already had our first bear sighting the week before when we were in Yellowstone. This occurred when we spotted a grizzly bear from about 200 yards away, and we reacted by pounding our chests at having tamed the wild by simply having seen one of these killing machines. This would be a much different experience.
We froze at the sound of the footsteps, and turned to see a relatively small brown bear walking parallel to our camp. It did not appear to be even slightly bothered by our presence, and seemed quite content to continue its stroll through the woods. We reacted like any well-trained outdoors-men would… by grabbing our cameras and walking towards it to gawk and take as many pictures as possible. We’re really smart.
An hour later, the three of us were sitting around our campfire reveling in the retelling of our “near death” experience we had just had with the beast, when we heard footsteps and branches breaking again. We turned again to see an absolutely mammoth brown bear walking directly for us, closer to us than Eli Manning can accurately throw a football (not far).
We had done a little reading earlier about what to do if a bear approaches you. Apparently, the suggested method of survival is to NOT run, to NOT try to climb a tree, and to NOT back away. Evidently the bear can out-run, out-climb, and out-murder any human. For all those with as little experience as we had, the suggested tactic is to stand up and scream at the bear, and grab rocks and throw them at it. I am not making this up.
Would you throw a rock at this thing?
We sat on our tree stumps staring at the approaching monster, internally debating what we should do next. I quickly decided that there was no way I had the sack to throw a rock at this thing or yell “please rip my limbs off first”, and evidently the others decided the same… because we all stood cautiously in unison and began slowly inching our way back. God must have been busy with more pressing matters at the time, because my prayers for him to intervene and make the bear change direction went unheeded. And so we continued to back up. It got to our tent, and we were about 100 feet away – huddled together as if stranded out in a blizzard, and cowering in fear. Frantically we whispered a plan of attack – what should we do? How should we make it leave? Should we just stand here and let it go through our stuff? It was decided that it was time to begin screaming at it as loud as possible. We drew deep breaths, our hearts pounding at the thought of what this thing would do if we infuriated it by distracting it from its foraging. “Ok, let’s do this on the count of three,” Dave said… we began the slow count… “1………… 2………. 3……………” and all three of us let out a barely audible gasp of “bear.” Yeah, we have huge balls. That was our one and only attempt at scaring it away. It was shockingly unsuccessful.
Anyways… it finally lost interest and just walked away, and we slowly made our way back to the tent. We were quick to call it a night. Before dawn, however, it decided to pay us one final visit. I awoke to the sound of sniffing, grunting, and footsteps immediately outside our tent. I now officially know what the expression “paralyzed with fear” feels like due to this creature being less than a yard away – I assure you, it is an experience everyone should feel at some point (as long as you survive it). I debated waking up Dave and Sam by putting my hands over their mouths to prevent them from screaming, and thus cause our instant mauling… but apparently I was incapable of any physical movement. My only option was to pray… and pray like I never prayed before. “There are no atheists in a foxhole” – that is a fully accurate statement (I now know). Being hit by a mortar round may not have been the issue I faced, but the idea of having my head snapped off by a 1,500 pound monster was equally unappealing. The longest hour (or 4 minutes) of my life went by, and for some reason the bear reached the conclusion that killing us wasn’t on his agenda.
Sadly, that same week an unprovoked bear killed a man and injured two others when it decided to go through a tent in Yellowstone National Park. What caused that bear to strike and the bear in Yosemite to spare our lives we will never know. Life is funny that way – we were three morons out alone in the woods… those people in Yellowstone were in a crowded campground. You want a moral to the story?? Life is too random to have one.
Where Was It 
April 8th, 2011 at 11:47 AM
Oh, he didn’t come to start trouble, he just came to do the s……wait, someone just corrected me, bears in fact do just start trouble.
I feel like I’d throw the rock, because if I won that 5% survival gamble, I’d have the best story ever. If I ever go missing, then just tell people that it was probably a bear and rock thing.