You might find this hard to believe, but looking at a bear’s big behind at eye level from a distance of about 10 feet was not on my bucket list. Nevertheless, it happened to me recently so I guess that I can check that off some list.
When you spend as much time in the mountains as we (Panke Claim Staking Services) do, wildlife encounters are frequent, but this one merits a retell. It all happened so fast and was over so quickly that it wasn’t scary. It’s just a fun memory that I’ll keep in my treasure trove of claim staking memories. That’s my side of the perspective. From the bear’s point of view, I’m sure that he/she has it stashed in the, “embarassing moments” list of memories. Here’s how it went down.
I’d finished up some claim staking in Idaho and on my way home, I detoured a bit to fish a stretch of a river that has no roads or trails along it so you’ve got to bushwhack your way in and out. It’s probably very lightly fished, so the fishing can be excellent. I was moving from one nice fishing spot to another and it was quite a stretch in between spots, so I’d de-rigged my gear and was bouldering my way upstream along the bank. The river falls steeply in this stretch, so there is lots of water noise.
As is fairly common in old mining country, above the river on one hillside is a cut that follows the contours of the hillside that miners dug long ago as a ditch to bring water down to their placer workings. Here’s a 126 page, 1934 treatise from the US Bureau of Mines that’s more reading about ditches and placer mining than you’ve ever wanted to know. I reached a stretch of river that really closed in and there wasn’t a bank anymore, just water rushing through a tight channel with huge boulders. To get around it, I climbed up the steep bank to the old ditch line. I tried to find a good example picture online of old ditching contouring around a steep hillside above a river but didn’t find a great one. In the picture below you can see an old ditch cut into the hillside where the top yellow horizontal line is.
The climbing from river level up to the old ditch cut entailed finding a handhold in some rock above me, lifting myself up, finding a couple of footholds in rocks for my feet, looking up and finding another handhold, etc. The water rushing below was noisy. I reached up for one last handhold right on the lip of the ditch and pulled myself up so my head came up over the edge of the ditch. The old ditch was maybe 10 ft wide and on the other side of the ditch was a black bear ass. That’s all I saw, the big behind of a black bear. He was facing away from me and studiously digging into the hillside.
He obviously hadn’t heard or smelled me coming. For about one second I stared at his big butt in the air. I didn’t want to be this close to a bear that was going to get startled, but I didn’t have a lot of options. It had been handholds and footholds coming up and retreating would have been precarious. Moving up onto the horizontal level of the ditch didn’t seem a good option. What to do?
I didn’t do anything, just stayed frozen in place for one second and then the bear startled. I didn’t see it turn its head and see me. Who knows whether it was smell, sound, sight or that shrinking feeling that you get when a stranger sees you naked, but the bear suddenly knew that I was there. It exploded into movement and in a flash it had scaled the side of the cut and was on the hillside above it and was gone up the hillside and into the brush.
What did I do then? I pulled myself up onto the ditch, marvelled at the encounter, kept going upstream and continued my fishing.
So now I have this great memory. There wasn’t any fear like in my last bear tale. I remember the good fishing, the fun bouldering along the river, the closeness of that bear butt at eye level (probably above eye level), and maybe most of all, the sobering recollection of how incredibly fast that bear moved when it exploded into action and tore away.
