Barbecue lures uninvited guest
At midnight, a cinnamon-colored black bear, roughly 350 to 400 pounds, showed up on the back porch of our mountain cabin. His giant wet nose left a smudge on the glass door as he peered in.
He then proceeded to tear apart a propane barbecue to get to the grease catcher at the bottom of the aluminum basin. Wow, those slurps must have tasted good.
My efforts to ward it off, a feeble “Go away bear,” when I’m actually fascinated by them and enjoy sneaking up on them without being detected, ultimately failed. The bear would turn and amble off 30 or 40 feet through the support beams of a deck we are constructing, and then kept coming back for more slurps.
My wife, Denese, all 5-foot (on her toes) and 99 pounds of her, then ventured out on the porch in her robe, armed with the kitchen broom, to show me how it’s done.
“Go away bear!” she shouted, and this time, the bear knew she wasn’t kidding. She then took a swing with the broom, hitting the bear with a stream of air, like blowing in his face. They hate that, you know. The bear learned, you don’t mess with that girl, and off he went into the forest for keeps.
The broken pieces of barbecue were brought inside, and just like that, end of problem.
A game trail runs near our mountain cabin, and lots of bears, all sizes and colors, cruise by, at least one every few nights. You leave something out, like birdseed, dog food, trash, a juicy barbecue or camp food, and you’re going to get a visit.
As the weather turned warm this past week, the bears’ appetites across the Sierra, Cascade and Siskiyou ranges turned from grass, vegetation and ants to their annual craving for people food.
The most detailed reports come in from Yosemite National Park and Tahoe, though wild stories are common from anywhere that bears live.
In Yosemite, bear incidents are up 100 percent from this time last year (though way below the record years in the 1990s). A difference this spring is that bears are more active in wilderness than in Yosemite Valley. In a rare emergency, rangers closed the Snow Creek area to camping after a series of bear incidents with campers, reported wildlife specialist Caitlin Lee-Roney. Food raiding bears were also reported at Little Yosemite on the Half Dome Trail and Illilouette Creek in the canyon below Glacier Point.
The first wilderness area in Yosemite to melt off and provide good access is out of Hetch Hetchy, past Beehive and north to Vernon Lake, and a wild story was reported from here last week. Campers saw a bear slip when crossing Falls Creek, then get carried downstream. The bear rafted through whitewater and eventually emerged downstream and climbed out.
As summer takes hold, anything is possible. If you camp in the mountains, expect a stealth visit. If you live in bear country and set a freshly cooked pie on a windowsill to cool, don’t expect it to sit there for long.
High Sierra camps
The new concessionaire at Yosemite, Aramark, has decided to not open the High Sierra camps (and White Wolf Lodge), where reservations are in high demand and difficult to obtain. Most in the park believe this is about money, that is, that the season would be too short for Aramark to make a significant profit for the amount of work it takes to set the camps up. Aramark, on the other hand, says the camps will not open this year because of high snowpack and “lack of access to water for bathrooms and kitchens.”
Great white update
Big Whitey: In Monterey Bay offshore Seacliff State Beach, five great white sharks ranging 11 to 13 feet, the big boys reaching adulthood, were sighted and verified last week by naturalist Giancarlo Thomae. These are not the smaller juveniles, which eat small fish and not marine mammals, which have frequented the inshore waters in the afternoon. “I filmed one with a camera on a drone, and it was so massive all you could see was gray and white on the screen,” Thomae said. “This is a big, serious fish.”