.

 

 

It was the stench that awakened me. A smell like a road kill that had lain in the hot sun for two days after being flattened by a car tire. A stinking, disgusting odor so overpowering it causes you to gag and forces you to put your hand over your nose so you can breathe.

I struggled to open my eyes, crusted shut in what had been deep sleep, and fumbled for my headlamp. Oh, S--t! There in the light’s beam was the ugly snout of a bear forcing its way through the netting of my solo tent door. Two beady eyes, pumpkin orange in color, reflected in the light, glaring back at me, making the scene even more nightmarish and bizarre.

Some year ago, while hiking in Montana’s Glacier Park, my daughter, Aimee, who was a Forest Service park ranger at the time and my companion and guide, had given me a pressurized vial of a substance called capsaicin. It was early spring, the grizzlies had only recently emerged from their dens, and huge tracks crisscrossed every snow field that we crossed. Backcountry rangers like Aimee routinely carried this mace-like cayenne pepper derivative as a last resort weapon in the event of a grizzly attack. That vial was in my personal kit, which lay somewhere alongside my sleeping pad, but I simply could not will my hand to search for it. I’d like to think that such immobility was because I was still groggy from sleep. The truth is, however, I was struck with fear, and the only reaction I could muster was a scream. A scream so loud and so primal that the bear bowled over in a backward somersault. The bear was then lost to my flashlight beam until suddenly I heard a tremendous splash as the bear floundered across the stream in front of my tent site, and then a great thrashing and crashing as the bear ran headlong through the darkened woods and, as far as I know, is still running. With adrenaline pumping furiously through my very core, I managed to slither feet-first out of the nylon womb that was my tent.

A fire was quickly coaxed into a violent blaze, the crackling and popping of the resinous softwood providing a certain comfort zone. Now fully awake, I chuckled to myself at the absurdity of having to share my sleeping bag with a stinking hulk of a bear in a tent that barely held room for me.

“Hey, Bill! How do keep a bear from charging?” Answer: “You take away his credit card.”
If there is any merit in this encounter with the bear, it might be that bears are unpredictable. I was in a remote, seldom visited place. It was unlikely that the bear was what is known as “habituated” — a bear that has become conditioned to people and thus lost fear of humans.
I had cooked my supper yards away, downwind from my campsite. My provisions, mostly military M.R.A.s (meals ready to eat) in hermetically sealed pouches, were suspended 20 feet above the ground.

Perhaps the answer was just plain curiosity on the bear’s part, or it was because I had inadvertently chosen a tent site that was on the bear’s turf — his travel corridor?
A different situation exists in established campgrounds like Lows Lake, where designated campsites are within smelling distance of a Boy Scout mess hall. On the equally populated Lake Lila, where dozens of campers fill the air with aromatic scents of steaks and hot dogs as they prepare supper, these bear, unlike bear in wild places, have lost their innate fear. Their ransacking visits have become not only a nuisance but, in some cases, frightening when the marauding bear refuses to leave. As noted, bear observers call these bear habituated. Such bears often form a simple association — “people” followed by “food.” A bear with this expectation is referred to as food conditioned. The combination of a bear that is both habituated and food conditioned results in the intimidating bear problems that we have heard about this summer.

There was a particular lean-to at Lake Colden where you could almost be assured of a nightly bear visit no matter how cleverly you “bear proofed” the site — that bear finally had to be live-trapped and removed — a technique consisting of a large steel culvert with a spring-loaded door and baited with a side of beef cooked with a blow torch to produce bear-loving odors. The problem with this maneuver is that often even releasing the bear hundreds of miles away, there is no guarantee (as has often happened) that the bear won’t make a bee line back home. You are also giving a problem bear to others, and some feel that the whole stressful situation of being trapped, tranquilized, etc. makes the bear even more aggressive. Quite frankly, most rogue bears are now simply dispatched, which is just a euphemism for a dose of lead poisoning.
One resourceful (so they thought) couple who were camping on Hitchins Pond tried a different technique; they put their food supplies in their canoe and anchored it offshore. You guessed it!

The bear swam out, swamped the canoe and really created a mess.
There is reported to be a relatively stable population of 4.600 to 5,000 bear in the Adirondacks. With the exception of those garbage or habituated bears, they are mostly timid and especially adept at keeping themselves well hidden.

Even local deer hunters, many of whom spend numerous days in the field, often with sophisticated scent concealment suits with activated charcoal impregnated in the fabric to absorb odor, and utilizing camo paint and tree stands, seldom, if ever, encounter a bear.
That is not to say that even wild, non-habituated bear don’t visit the many camps in our area and become destructive. These invasions usually occur in the spring when the bear are ravenous from their long winter sleep (they are not technically true hibernators), or in the fall, especially if there is a poor berry or beechnut crop when they must accumulate fat stores before the den up.

A visit to some of these camps in the unoccupied offseason is a study in inventiveness (and frustration) as the camp owners seek to protect their camp. Bed springs nailed across windows, sharpened cross-cut blades laid along window sills, thick wooden shutters, moth balls suspended in netting and nailed to a building corners — you name it.

At one camp at a Follensby Park lease, broken glass shards were impregnated along window sills. Yes, the bear busted down the front door! He then turned over a large cooking range, tore the door off the propane fridge, and tipped over tables and bunks. To add insult to injury, he got his claws caught in a gallon of paint we used to mark trails and, in his gyrations to rid himself of the can, the lid came off and splashed paint all over the camp. Imprinted in the paint on the floor were his footprints that led to a hole in the side of the camp where he exited.

Two days later, Ed Martin, the camp’s best hunter (“walk one, stop two’), who could throw a can in the air and put two holes in it before it hit the ground, caught up to a bear with paint-splattered fur and evened the score.

I once asked the late Dave Short, superintendent of Whitney Park, what he did to protect the dozen of outlying camps under his supervision. Dave told me that the single best deterrent to protect bear vandalism was an electric fence such as used by farmers to keep their cattle from wandering. When Whitney youngsters were around those fences, he could disconnect the circuit, and the clicking of the battery-operated device alone was ordinarily enough to keep the bears away.

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection