Bear Incident Report
Not that you asked, but what could be worse than being subjected to vacation photos? Why vacation photos embedded in a narrative of dubious informative value, with quotes from John Muir, of course. Yosemite National Park. After we parked our rental under a sheer, red cliff, in a field which would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been crammed with cars, lugged our backpacks to the backpackers’ camp and pitched our tent, like many of the other not-too-wildernessy campers, we went to get a beer and a bite to eat. We returned to camp at dusk and had just gotten a fire started when this French guy came running up and asked if he could borrow our flashlight. We gave it to him and he shone it on the shimmering fur of a black bear not more than 25ft away. “Ze Bear, he eez not aferd ov uz”, said the French guy. The bear snuffled around under the pines and trundled off in the dark toward French’s tent, and French and his girlfriend, who was speaking rapidly and fervently in her native tongue, disappeared after it with our flashlight. We wondered if we’d ever get our flashlight back. John Muir, in his diary of August 13, 1869 refers to the bears that plagued Yosemite shepherds’ sheep as “shaggy freebooters”, as in: “We also discovered another dead sheep half-eaten, showing there had been two of the shaggy freebooters at this early breakfast.” Or, as he writes on the 14th:
“Up to the time I went to bed last night all was quiet, though we expected the shaggy freebooters every minute. They did not come till near midnight, when a pair walked boldly to the corral between two of the great fires, climbed in, killed two sheep and smothered ten, while the frightened watcher in the tree did not fire a single shot, saying that he was afraid he might kill some of the sheep, for the bears got into the corral before he got a good clear view of them. I told the shepherds they should at once move the flock to another camp. ‘Oh, no use, no use,’ they lamented. ‘Where we go the bears go too. See my poor dead sheeps, soon all dead. No use try another camp. We go down to the plains.’ And as I afterwards learned, they were driven out of the mountains a month before the usual time.”Muir goes on to remark his amazement that the bears never attack people, but I hadn’t read any Muir at that point, and, it turns out, this was not one of the many areas in which he was right. We banked up our fire. A couple came down the trail and we warned them about the bear. French came back and asked if he could continue to borrow our flashlight and disappeared, wild-eyed, back into the darkness. Eventually he returned it, shrugged, and said he thought the bear was gone. We sat at the fire and drank a beer while our neighbors, wearing head-mounted lamps, mysteriously rearranging their camp, then moved their tent five feet. Eventually, we tried to go to sleep, without much luck as every hour someone would scream “BEAR! GIT! YAH, YAH! GET OUTTA HERE” followed by banging pots and pans , which is Standard Bear Operating Procedure, as dictated by National Parks literature included with our “Bear Incident Report” sheet, only to be filled out, we were admonished by a park ranger who looked like a 12-year-old elfin princess in a ranger uniform, in cases of actual interaction with the bear. If you are approached by a bear, she said, make a lot of noise and don’t worry about waking people up. Types of Bear Incident interaction included “Bluff Charge”, which the ranger pantomimed as a sort of sudden advancement with lowered shoulders, but we were less than confident in our ability to discern, in an Actual Bear Situation, the difference between a bluff and real charge. Also, said the ranger, it was best to leave your backpack and its pockets unzipped to give the bear easy and unrestricted access, lest it deem necessary clawing apart your pack to get inside. In this respect, bears are like Homeland Security at the airport.
At about three, something went WHUMP by our heads and Jen jumped up and grabbed me. At five, she outlined a set of adjusted plans, in which the intrepid backpackers skip their overnight stay in the wilderness, instead opting for a couple of day hikes, and then drive back to San Francisco. We were up with the sunrise, which is interesting in Yosemite Valley because the colorful rocks at the apex of the cliffs and peaks gleam, while below, it remains dark. You find yourself at the bottom of a very deep, pine-scented and scenic hole.
We hiked to the head of the Mist Trail to Vernal and Nevada falls… it’s the first section of the John Muir trail, which runs past Half Dome, then on some 200 km. This was an absolutely splendid hike, despite our wrecked condition… the sun angled across vertical rock faces with high contrast between the light and shadow containing every possible shade of folded, buckled granite–ochre, purple, pink, gray and blue, all veined darkly. You could see anything in those mountains: cubist faces of God with scrub pine growing out of His nose, entire scenes of John Muir discovering Yosemite, or the visage of some great Native American ancestor sternly regarding your upward progress. The cliffs range from steep, pebbled slants that end in boulder-clumped talus, to gaping, overhung hollows. As we climbed the trail among massive, lichen-dotted boulders, an atomized mist from the falls above wafted over us. We reached a bridge where a parks worker industriously applied a leaf-blower to the roof of a public restroom. We’d wondered, as we climbed, about the motor sound echoing through the canyon. After taking in the long view of the glowing valley and the falls high above, we continued upward on steps scraped into the canyon walls above an aqua-green champagne river fizzing through the boulders below. We sat out on dewy grass outcrops at face level with Vernal falls, the water cracking and blasting outward against the base of the tower of water. In “The Yosemite”, Muir, with his characteristic effusive tendency toward personification that, at its extreme, makes you wonder if he might just have been high on Mendocino County pot, writes:
“The Vernal, about a mile below the Nevada, is 400 feet high, a staid, orderly, graceful, easy-going fall, proper and exact in every movement and gesture, with scarce a hint of the passionate enthusiasm of the Yosemite or of the impetuous Nevada, whose chafed and twisted waters hurrying over the cliff seem glad to escape into the open air, while its deep, booming, thunder-tones reverberate over the listening landscape. Nevertheless it is a favorite with most visitors, doubtless because it is more accessible than any other, more closely approached and better seen and heard. A good stairway ascends the cliff beside it and the level plateau at the head enables one to saunter safely along the edge of the river as it comes from Emerald Pool and to watch its waters, calmly bending over the brow of the precipice, in a sheet eighty feet wide, changing in color from green to purplish gray and white until dashed on a boulder talus. Thence issuing from beneath its fine broad spray-clouds we see the tremendously adventurous river still unspent, beating its way down the wildest and deepest of all its cañons in gray roaring rapids, dear to the ouzel. . .”
We took our time up the steep slab steps with their twisted rail, climbing at well over 45 degrees to gain the wide, smooth slab across which the river cuts before sluicing over the edge. As we climbed, and sat snacking beside the falls, Chickarees, or Douglas Squirrels, which had been visible on the trail and stairs, watched, hopeful for some snack, and at the falls scurried right up to us. They only got one dropped dried cranberry. Jen and I knew better after a painful encounter with a chipmunk up in Algonquin Park in Canada (chipmunk incisor, Jen’s thumb). The Emerald Pool is this incredibly inviting, aptly named pool above the fall, into which the river spills from an incredibly long inclined plane, a natural waterslide, surrounded by signs that explain hysterically that to swim in the Emerald Pool is to die in the Emerald Pool. 1Half-Dome, Nevada Falls, and two other towering monoliths, looking out over Vernal Fall, and the long vista of the valley, the cliffs capped with isolated, scrubby meadows.
We ate some snacks and hiked even higher… it began to get really hot on the loose, moon dust and gravel trail at just under 7000ft. Eventually we began to descend again, looking out along the valley where vistas were framed in vistas and, within that vista, what was that? Surprise! Another vista! We waited patiently behind lines of carefully descending mules carrying terrified Asian kids while their guides shouted words of encouragement at the mules. A couple of hikers said “Go Cubs” in response to my Reds cap, to which I responded “Go Reds”… then one of them said back: “Hey. Are you the people who told us about the bear last night at the back packer’s camp?” We confessed that we were. They told us that in the brief interval that they had visited the general store at Camp Curry to supplement their supplies, the bear had gotten into their tent, torn up a sleeping pad, and relieved itself (No. 2). They were the campers I had seen mysteriously moving their tent five feet. This hearty couple was setting out for two weeks on the John Muir trail–they’d just lucked into a couple of trail passes, having flown in from Blacksburg, Virginia without reservations. The bear, said the guy, before hiking on up the dusty trail, “had definitely been eating people food”. They’d done everything right: had properly applied their bear canister, left their packs outside of their tent, etc. Jen suggested that they had probably gotten the worst out of the way and had now amassed a supply of good karma. We wished them luck. When they were out of earshot, we agreed that they were obviously suicidal maniacs. This discussion went something along the lines of: “They’re making us look kind of like pansies.” “If that had been us, we would have been like ‘sorry Marcie’ and just left the tent, gotten in the car and driven back that night.”
In Curry Village, which is for the most part a collection of for-rent so-called cabins of mildewed vinyl tarpaulin, where so-called campers’ boom boxes compete and incoming visitors troll the gravel lots for parking spots, then migrate en masse and rather cult-like toward the restaurants and points-of-retail to stand in line for overpriced pizza and beer, it is easy to see why the National Parks Service has slated the area for reclamation. We came across a deer in the middle of the parking lot, ribby and mange-flanked, eating from one of the stunted green apple trees amid the SUVs. It didn’t stop eating as we walked eight feet away from it. And in the parking lot and beside the campground you come across these bear traps–basically a large trailer-mounted corrugated steel tubes with breathing holes and a trap door on one end, with a large sign that says: WARNING: BEAR TRAP. Its being mounted on a trailer facilitates bear removal, one assumes, but the whole contraption looks a lot like a wide-bore Howitzer for blasting the bear into the next canyon. All of the evidence suggests a troubled relationship between the visiting hordes and the indigenous wildlife. “A Fed Bear is a Dead Bear”, reads one recurring sign. The roads are dotted with red bear silhouettes which indicate where bears have been struck and killed, so you really have to feel for the bears–but it is absolutely ridiculous to hope that, with traffic jams of visiting tourists with barbeques attached to their Winnebagos, the bears aren’t going to come out.
On a bike path through a scenic meadow, eight or nine amateur photographers lined up for the perfect shot of a couple of foraging fawns. No sign of the doe. We took the shuttle bus back to the parking lot were our rented car waiting under a scrubby apple tree near a bear trap. At one bus stop, everybody craned their necks to see what everybody else was craning their necks at. “There’s a bear cub, over there, playing in the dirt.” The entire family seated behind us got off to view the majestic beauty of the bear cub in nature. We stayed on the bus, wondering what mama bear would think of all this, got off at our car, hit the road south, determined to see the Mariposa grove before the long drive back to SF.
Later, as we drove south toward the Mariposa Sequoia Grove, Jen suggested that as a “hilarious joke”, I should just “walk right into the world-famous Wawona hotel and ask if they happen to have any cancellations. As always, Jen had painstakingly researched every aspect of visiting Yosemite, and the Wawona Hotel dates back to the 1800s, is picturesque and comfortable at the trail-head to the Mariposa grove, lacks to this day telephones and televisions, and is absolutely impossible to get a room in. Jen kept repeating the joke, and when we pulled into the Mariposa visitor’s center, it stood beside the inviting, deep eaves and intricate, whitewashed woodwork of this venerable Yosemite institution. After entering the visitor center, running my fingers through a plush black bear pelt, and feeling, myself, a bit like a dust- and sweat-encrusted bear, I walked up the broad steps to the cool lobby and asked: “I have a silly question. Do you have any vacancies?” To which a stern and rather matronly maitres d’hotel replied that yes, they had a one bedroom without a bathroom. I think this is the best $129+ tax I will ever spend in the state of California, and it’s easy, as everyone knows, to spend a lot of money and quick in Cali. If there is a heaven, it should be like the Wawona hotel. Lawns slope from the pine forest, a warm breeze rustles off the golf course, sun-stroked visitors sip cocktails on verandas that apron each cottage. On August 4, 1869,
Muir opens his journal “It seemed strange to sleep in a paltry hotel chamber after the spacious magnificence and luxury of the starry sky and Silver Fir grove.” Well our room seemed anything but paltry, and I guess that’s the difference between a Scottish shepherd meets amateur naturalist and a couple of vacationing Ohioans circa 2008. We availed ourselves of the pool, drank a Sierra Nevada, enjoyed cocktail hour on the porch of the hotel where a pianist played Summertime and other greats, ate an epic meal with a bottle of Sonoma Valley Fire Engine Red Pinot , and looked up at the stars in a glen behind the Moore cottage, . The thought did cross our minds that, theoretically, a bear could careen out of the chaparral and eat us. So we didn’t wander too far from the lights of Wawona. Sleep, check. The hotel serves a great breakfast (included), and then we were off early for the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia. The Sequoia Grove seems more ancient, somehow, than the mountains, as though they’re aliens from before the earth began, or like mythic beasts, given their reliance on fire for reproduction. The woods themselves are anything but dense, and everywhere is evidence of fire. Giant Sequoia seedlings cannot compete, and the fires both eliminate competition and stimulate seed production in the upper canopy. In California, in 2008, signs of the long-running drought are everywhere, not to mention conflicted efforts of people to make the landscape accessible, to render it on human terms and to save it–except that the saved version seems irreversibly tame. Again, the encountered deer that completely ignored us, even as they passed several feet away. The California Tunnel tree and the the Fallen Tunnel Tree (where a coterie of oily black ravens heckled us as though we were personally responsible for the tree’s fall in a terrible 1969 winter) show just how quickly several thousand years of growth can be undone, but also provide a sense of the scale of life, the universe, and its processes, in geological and evolutionary terms, processes as incontrovertible as the upthrust slabs of raw granite that underlie our present, petty existence. Sure, Schwarzenegger’s governor of California, but so was Pontus Pilate once a governor… we leave scratches on history, but these trees, these rocks might as well stand in relationship to us as the desert sands did to Ozymandias. Odd that we are the competition and the means of propagation: it has come to this: the deliberate setting of fires by those who would be husbands of the wilderness. Which entails, basically, what wilderness?
Many have wondered where the sequoias came from, whether they are on the brink of disappearing. My post-Yosemite reading took me to an interesting article about Sequoias that, in discussing their previous distribution and historical migrations, makes them sound quite a lot like a lost tribe of Native Americans. While John Muir was wondering how it was that the Sequoia groves stood isolated from one another, without signs at their perimeter of dead trees (which themselves can last thousands of years–and indeed, Muir made remarkable observations as to the groves’ presence in areas undisturbed by the “mare de glace”), horticulturalists, especially English ones, were sprouting Giant Sequoias in Europe. Today, Giant Sequoias are possibly the largest trees in Europe. While sequoias can only propagate under a very specific set of conditions, they have flourished around the world, under human care. Human beings, then, as far as the Giant Sequoia are concerned, are simply incredibly advanced, jet-setting, gardening and greenhouse-owning squirrels, distributing sequoia seeds to such far-flung locations as Egypt and New Zealand. It is important to note, however, that Giant Sequoia have never self-propagated in “captivity”, such is the specificity of the conditions required, but it helps, seeing the fragility of the Mariposa grove, to know that there are Giant Sequoia alive and well the world over.
When we began the drive west to San Francisco, the sky took on a biblical, bloody tinge. The sun, reflected in the windshields of oncoming cars, looked like a ruby laser, the roadside a Martian landscape of acid-trip hues. Our eyes burned and a fat-bellied helicopter thumped low over the highway, going forth to face the dragon. At our exit, the ranger sunnily bade us have a good day, as though everything were completely normal, which, we supposed, it was. We drove the parched width of California, past Hetch Hetchy, the dammed reservoir that supplies San Francisco’s water, and against which John Muir fought and lost. We sped through passes, gold rush towns, along the flat plain beside perfectly rowed and ingeniously irrigated orchards. Approaching Oakland, I-580 climbs ridges where a thousand ominous scissors spin–this is the Altamont wind farm, the subject of recent environmentalist criticism for the inordinate number of migrating raptors it kills. All of which goes to show that good intentions don’t mean squat.
It wasn’t until Monday in a San Francisco coffee shop that we caught the headlines: Yosemite Fire Out of Control. Obviously, fires have been raging in Yosemite since Yosemite began, but global warming can’t be helping the matter. Anyway, it was a good vacation, even if it did make the outdoors here in Southern Ohio look like a Superfund Site (newsflash: Fernald has just been opened up as a nature preserve. Seriously.) Anyway, can’t wait to get back in the wilderness, such as it is, and hope to get deep into the mountains next time. Maybe they’ll succeed in ridding Yosemite of cars–force everyone to hike, bike, or take an electric shuttle in. Possibly put a Plexiglas dome over the Sierras, while they’re at it. In the meantime, we’ll settle for Minnesota, Canada, or North Carolina. There’s always next summer and plenty left of this one.
