Unsupported Speculation

Just came back from a day hike. I was trying to reach the top of a small mountain near my house when I had an encounter with a black bear, and decided it was wise to turn around and head back, and not try to push any farther towards the top.

I was prepared for this, because black bears do live here. I packed a thick rubber dry bag to keep my trash in, so that scents wouldn’t continue to emanate from my pack. I also carried bear spray which I got out but didn’t end up needing to use it during this trip. Last night, I also made a bear bell-like thing out of a metal camping cup with an empty Vienna Sausage can placed inside, so I could shake the cup to make a very loud rattling noise.

My plan with the rattler was ideally to scare off any bears as I was making my way through the woods and up the mountain, and that I wouldn’t even know they were there. But the next best thing happened instead, and I’ll write about that shortly.

Anyway, I’m out of shape. I’d bought this exercise bike, but I hardly ever use it, and it always ends up becoming an expensive clothes rack. What I like to do it walk, but the roads here in the country are a little unfavorable to people on foot. I’d been trying to keep my legs in shape with weighted lunges and things like that, but what I really wanted to do is hike.

So, I decided I was going to hike to the top of one of the area’s small mountains and then back home. I packed, and this morning I headed out.

I chose a couple roads that would bring me to a part of the mountain that has the most shallow gradient towards the top, and once I got off them, I was heading north through the woods and up the mountain.

Briars weren’t actually bad there, unlike other parts of these woods which have briar bushes so large they force you to walk around huge patches of them. Poison ivy and oak was in small amounts. It was mostly lots and lots of dried fallen leaves from last year’s Autumn. The whole time, I had the camping cup rattler in my hand, and I’d give it a loud shake every twenty seconds or so.

After climbing a bit, and stopping at large rocks I found here and there on my way up to sit down and rest, I came to what might have been some old hunter’s or logging dirt road. This was unmarked on my maps, but I saw that turning left onto it would take me higher up the mountain, so that’s what I did.

When I got a little low on energy, I stopped and sat down again, and ate a small individual packet of jelly beans I have as an energy snack, and put the wrapper into the dry bag to keep the scent of it out of the air, and then kept heading up.

I then spied the beginning of another dirt road just to the right of the one I was on, and saw that it would likely lead me to the top of the mountain, so I crossed over onto it and kept heading up, and continuing to shake my rattler.

Then without any warning at all, I saw a black bear running from left to right about 300 feet away, in a run they apparently do when they propel themselves forwards with both of their back feet, and then land on both of their front feet, and then propel themselves again with their back feet.

I froze and got out my bear spray from the holster on my belt and pulled the safety tab off the thumb trigger. While I was doing that, the empty Vienna Sausage can fell out of the camping cup, and was hanging from an elastic hairband on the camping cup’s handle.

The bear brought itself to a stop about 200 feet away, and then with what looked like a balancing effort, it rose itself onto both of its back legs to stand up and get a good look at me.

I had my spray pointed in its direction, and tried rattling the cup, but it didn’t do much without the can inside of it, so keeping my eyes on the bear, I got the can back into the cup, and gave it a loud rattle, and then rose my arms up high like the letter Y, and waited to see what the bear would do.

It worked, and the bear got an uncertain look as it looked to its right and then lowered itself back onto the ground, and then ran but not as quickly right to left along its original path, and then stopped somewhat behind some thin trees to continue to watch me.

Now you aren’t supposed to turn your back to a bear, but I didn’t have much a choice because I was on a slope, so what I did was turn back for five to ten steps before facing the bear’s direction again to see if it was trying to get closer, and I did this all the way back down the mountain, rattling the camping cup, and with the bear spray in my hand, until I got back onto the road that brought me there.

All and all, the trip was a success, because I didn’t get mauled by a bear. The rattler I made at least warned the bear while I was still fairly far away that I was there, which was much better than surprising the bear when it was very close. I’ll continue to use these on my hikes in the future, because while a bear probably isn’t afraid of much, you at least give them an opportunity to hear you and check you out before they move away again.

Black bears give birth to cubs in the winter, and so one point about this I thought of is that if there were cubs up there, then a female bear probably has a limited ability to move cubs away from a human that is hiking through the area. Cubs are like children, and bear communication is probably limited anyway, which means any idea of continuing to head up the mountain is crazy-foolish, because if that was a female bear, it would have no choice but to attack.

So that’s legs day. The moral of this story is that bears are a bit too intelligent to be scared away with a simple rattler or bell, but what you might be able to do instead is give them a long-distance warning you are around. Having one check you out from a distance is the second best option to succeeding in scaring it off before you ever know it is there.