The first
thing I did was make our presence known to the bear by shouting (not screaming,
or yelling). Normally, bears will run
away from humans when they see or hear them.
Oddly enough, all the bear did was look at me. I continued to shout, but the bear didn’t
seem interested and was more or less sniffing around the area. This is where I got worried. I felt we were somewhat protected on the
ledge, but wasn’t one-hundred percent sure whether or not the bear was capable
of climbing up the Cat Walk to reach us.
At the same time, descending would put us either right next to or
downhill from the bear…so we were essentially stuck up there.
After what
seemed like an eternity, but were only a few minutes, the bear started off in
the opposite direction and headed along the cliff. My wife and I were relieved, and I began
formatting how and where we would descend the ledge. But, just as we started coiling the rope the
bear returned, and this time he came much closer to us. The bear didn’t exhibit any aggressive behavior,
but the fact that he came back after all the noise we made had me very
concerned. All I could think of was
protecting my wife, who wasn’t quite panicking but was obviously
terrified. I moved us down the opposite
end of the ledge and threw the rope around a tree and set my wife up on rappel telling
her not to go all the way to the ground.
From the face of the buttress, I could see around the corner where the
bear would come from, if he was to come.
By this time, there was no sign or sound of the bear and I felt like we
were in the clear. I had my wife descend
slowly, stopping every few feet, and I told her when she was about 15 feet from
the ground that when she touched down to immediately unclip herself and head
down the trail. I told her not to run,
but to walk quickly and keep looking back.
I was already set up to rappel, so I was never more than a few feet away
from her.
When we
reached our car a few minutes later I called the Park Service and asked if they
could send a Ranger to accompany me back up to the cliff so I could retrieve my
climbing pack (it contained no food, so I was sure the bear would have left it
alone). My wife waited at the car, and
the Ranger and I headed up finding no sign of the bear and my pack and its
contents still intact. The Ranger told
me that the bear was foraging the acorns that had littered the forest
floor. The bear wasn’t exhibiting any aggressive
behavior because he wasn’t interested in us, as much as he was the acorns
(which kept him in the area). He also
asked if I saw any tags in the bear’s ears, and I didn’t. He said the Park Service will tag aggressive bear’s
ears; thankfully our bear wasn’t one of them because he told a story of a
double-tagged bear’s aggressiveness with two fishermen a few weeks back where
the bear had to be shot. I asked the
Ranger if the bear would have been able to climb the rock to the ledge we were
on, and he said no.
I’m not sure
I would have handled the situation any differently than I did. My main concern was keeping my wife safe from
the bear, as well as getting her down from the cliff safely. As shook up as we both were, neither one of
us feel like this will keep us from the woods, or from climbing. I suppose this situation was a bit of an
oddity in that the bear didn’t leave us.
The bear was busy eating, and since we were up on the ledge he might not
have felt any threat where he would have to run or need to pursue us.
