This is another in the “Sunday Story” series. No politics or deep philosophical points to be made. Just another story “from the trail”.
Bear Bags
So in a previous life, I spent a lot of time in the wilderness. Some portion of each summer I was out on the trail backpacking. I started at eleven as a Boy Scout, hiking Southeastern Ohio and Kentucky. From there, it was a trip to the Scout reservation in Cimarron, New Mexico, two hundred square miles of mountains and wilderness called Philmont Scout Ranch.
I went to Philmont twice, once as a kid, and once as an adult leader. We always saw a lot of wildlife out there, but bears were the big concern. The black bears at Philmont were very used to the thousands of kids who marched the trails there each year. They were so good at stealing the “crew” food rations that it wasn’t enough to just hang “bear bags” over tree limbs. The bears had that strategy figured out – they’d shimmy out the limb and slash the rope. Then they’d climb down and feast on three days food supply for twelve people. Once they did that, the “crew” had to divert from their “itinerary” to find more supplies.
So we made the equation more complex. We’d string a rope between two trees, then had the “bear bag” rope over that – suspending the bag high enough that the bear couldn’t get it. That seemed to work.
Bear Rules
We were warned – bears like things that smell good. There were horror stories: the kid who washed his hair with shampoo that a bear scalped, and the other poor Scout who decided to wear deodorant on the trail. A bear came in his tent and ate his armpits. Whether those stories were actually true or not really didn’t matter – we were convinced. No midnight snacks in the tent, no smelly soaps for “pot baths”. If everyone smelled bad, no one noticed – we were united in stink. But the theory was the bears wouldn’t notice either.
I was thirteen that first time out in New Mexico, so I was ready for any story they told. Looking back, I’m not absolutely sure that a bear stuck his head in my tent the second night out on the trail. It sounded like a bear, the grunts and the shuffle, and I heard the canvas tent flap open in the night (it was 1970, no fancy lightweight nylon tents for us). I was convinced a bear was “checking us out”, and concerned that my tentmate Mike might have snuck a Hersey’s Tropical Chocolate into the tent. (The “Trop Choc” was a Hersey bar made so hard that it didn’t melt in a backpack, nor in the sun, nor in your mouth, honestly. But it sure tasted good after dehydrated chili mac and hard tack crackers. It, at least, was real).
Close Encounters
But now I’m not so sure there weren’t Philmont Staff or other adults making sure that the “young-ins” were snug in their sacks. And I can’t say I actually saw the bear, just the inside of my sleeping bag, pulled over my face, waiting for the shred of bear claws.
We emerged in the morning with a good story, and no injuries. And bears, real or not, weren’t our only contact with wildlife on our trip. We also had an encounter with a less intimidating creature – porcupines. Now we were all smart enough to avoid touching the animals (I told a porcupine tale in an earlier “Sunday Story,” Hiking with Jack). But what we didn’t know was that porcupines had a special taste for toilet paper.
AP Paper
We were encamped in a staffed area that had “Kaibos”, wooden outhouses. That was a luxury: most of the time we had to dig small holes and hang onto trees to do our business. Now in the normal course of camping it’s a “nice” thing to leave AP paper in the “Kaibo” as a courtesy to the next user. (That stands for All Purpose Paper – toilet paper was used as paper towels for cleaning dishes as well as its more normal use).
And at Philmont, the porcupines were more than happy to accept such courtesy. They would take the rolls of toilet paper and chew them into tiny white balls. Then they would scatter the balls throughout the camping area and woods. The next morning the “Staff” had a duty for us Scouts. For two hours we wandered the area, picking up little white balls like snow of carefully chewed AP Paper. Keeping Philmont clean was an important goal.
It Was This Big
When I went back to Philmont years later as an adult, I was less concerned about the wildlife. I’d met a bear in Pennsylvania – we were hiking the same trail. He was going South and I was going North, and when we met, we both turned and headed the other direction quickly. So I assumed bears didn’t want to meet us any more than we wanted to meet them.
Our crew had just climbed Mt. Baldy the day before, at 12,400 feet the highest peak in Philmont. So we had an easy day planned, spending the morning hanging out at a staffed camp. The kids all went down to pan gold in the nearby creek – and I had a few minutes of quiet at camp to relax. We had a short hike scheduled for the afternoon, so the “bear bag” was down, ready to be apportioned out to the group.
The grunts and shuffling noises hadn’t changed. I looked up from our fire to see a small (maybe 400 pound) bear trying to work his way through the heavy duty plastic surrounding our food. Now Philmont protocol was to bang pots and pans together to try to “scare” the bear away. My suspicion is that nothing scares bears, but maybe the banging would annoy him enough to leave.
So I took a pan and our coffee pot, and banged them so hard that the pan was useless afterwards. The bear, happy as a “bear in a food pile”, didn’t seem particularly interested in my noise. He was working on our lunch.
Glass Houses
It was a fourteen mile round trip to get re-supplied – and I wasn’t looking forward to it. So I committed the “cardinal sin” of how not to be on the good side of bears. I picked up a rock, and chucked it at him. Now today I couldn’t hit a barn, but that shot was lucky, and I pegged the bear right on the nose. He was not pleased.
He dropped our lunch, and began to advance on me. Now I knew I was in trouble – you can’t outrun a bear, and you can’t out climb them either. But I started a quick retreat anyway. Luckily, after a few steps the bear remembered he had a lunch already in paw, so rather than making a dinner of me, he headed back to the pile. He grabbed OUR lunch, and dragged it up into a tree nearby.
Soon after the kids came back and seemed skeptical of my bear story. Even the dented pan didn’t seem enough to convince them. So we tore down our camp, and got ready for our afternoon transit. But as the tents were coming down, I heard a yell. The bear was back for a second course. The kids were yelling and running, and I was doing a whole lot of “I told you so”. The bear seemed confused by all of the action, and retreated back to his tree.
He posed for pictures there and several of the crew got one. I think there is still a bear portrait hanging in the Scout Cabin here in Pataskala. But picture or no, we all got a good bear story to tell.
The Sunday Story Series
- Riding the Dog – 1/24/21
- Hiking with Jack – 1/31/21
- A Track Story – 2/7/21
- Ritual – 2/14/21
- Voyageur – 2/19/21
- A Dog Story – 2/25/21
- A Watkins Legend – 3/7/21
- Ghosts at Gettysburg – 3/14/21
- Lessons from the State Meet – 3/28/21
- More Lessons from the State – 4/4/21
- Stories from the Road – 4/11/21
- A Bear Wants You – 5/1/21
