The summer of 1993 was one of the driest in history in southern Colorado. Across the state, bears were driven from their usual foraging grounds, increasingly looking in dumpsters and other human treasure troves for the hungry beasts.
I was running a camp in Rio Grande National Forest, 35 miles southwest of Alamosa, Colorado and we experienced more than a little bear trouble. In the middle of 1,000,000 acres of forest, fifteen miles from the nearest paved road, we were the only non-natural source of food for the increasingly fearless critters.
Over a period of roughly two weeks things progressed from an occasional sighting of a bear in the area of a camp, to almost nightly encounters, to the bears just hanging out on the roof of our dining hall.
The dining hall was a 2,500 square foot log building. To create windows, the logs were irregularly spaced, leaving gaps anywhere from 12” to 30” long, and one logs-width (8 inches) high. The openings were covered with a flimsy window plastic. The building was (I thought) completely bear-proof.
One morning I came into the kitchen at 5:30 AM and noticed that it was a bit drafty. I looked all around and didn’t notice anything. Something made me look straight up and I noticed that the skylight was gone! The Plexiglas cover had been ripped right off.
Other than their being a 21 Ѕ” by 30” hole in the roof, there was nothing out of place. Later that morning I climbed up on the roof and replaced the missing cover.
The next morning when I came in, the skylight had once more been ripped open. On top of the huge Blodgett commercial double oven, I had left a #10 can filled with bacon drippings from the previous morning’s breakfast. There, in the top of the can was a perfect nose-print of a black bear. The wily creature had hung from the rafters, too scared to drop all the way to the floor, and gotten herself a snout-full of grease. A few people in camp were afraid of the bears, but they had not really gotten too close to anyone in camp and the primary conversation surrounded how cute they were, or “they are really kind of little.”
We had a couple of groups in camp at the time, eighty high schools kids from two Christian churches in southwestern Oklahoma. The two youth ministers were brothers in seminary at Phillips Theological Seminary in Enid, Oklahoma.
Paul and David were big boys. David was the big brother in a chronological sense. But at 6’2” 245# he was the little brother in the family. Paul came in at 6’3” 315# and most of us thought of him as pretty big. Paul had a full ride to UCLA that earlier in his youth he had squandered for academic reasons.
In any case, one evening about dusk Paul heard a knock on his cabin door. He slammed it as quickly as he could. “I’m not accustomed to looking up at people, and that bear was standing on the porch, and I was looking up into its face.”
Paul was lucky that the bear didn’t really want in too badly, because the homemade wooden door would not have slowed a 350# adult black bear down for a second.
One summer, while camped in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I observed a nearby “camper,” who had reserved a cabin next to the campground, feeding (against every park regulation and admonition) an adult bear. After a few minutes the novelty wore off it was time to move on to the next tourist amusement. The bear, however, had other ideas. The man rolled up his bag of marshmallows and retreated to the cabin, hastily closing the door behind him.
The bear simply reached its claws under the bottom edge of the door, and ripped it right off its hinges. The terrified family scrambled out of the cabin while the bear merrily shredded packs and bag and coolers, feasting on whatever it could find.
The next evening I saw the mama bear up on the dining hall roof again. She was standing up on the peak, considering her means of ingress to the kitchen. I grabbed a rock about the size of a baseball and drilled her square in the head. She fell backwards, rolling down the roof. I was horrified. I didn’t really want to hurt her; I just wanted her to go away. She stopped, just a foot or two short of falling off the building to the ground.
It might have been better if she had fallen clear to the ground.
Two nights after the bacon grease incident, I again had fixed the skylight, this time with a piece of ѕ” plywood screwed down to the frame that had housed the Plexiglas cover. But the bear was a bit more emboldened. Sometime in the middle of the night, she got into the kitchen, dropping down to the floor this time, and having a field day with everything that wasn’t securely stored inside refrigerators or stainless steel cabinets. When she was through shopping, she apparently could not remember how she had gotten in.
The little windows in the logs were far too small for a bear to climb through, but that didn’t stop her from trying. Every window, more than 100 of them, was ripped out. It took me nearly two days’ work to replace all the shredded plastic, removing cedar 1x2’s cutting the plastic, wrapping and renailing them one by one.
During the time that we were dealing with this problem, there was a bear that had broken into a trailer near Salida, killing and eating the resident. The Colorado Division of Wildlife came and trapped the bears we were dealing with, dropping them some miles away.
Summer of 2004 I had bears ransack my camp in the Wet Mountains, southwest of Pueblo, Colorado as well. Interestingly they drank all of the soda that had sugar in it, but left cases of Diet Coke alone. How could they tell what was inside the cans??
Bears ransacked the kitchen at my camp in the Wet Mountains.
The work of bears not on a diet!
Happy mama bear!
Who says bears can’t climb trees?
