A bear encounter of the close kind

On Saturday, July 29, my nephew Zack, 27, of New York, and I, 66 from Pittsburgh, took Glacier National Park’s Loop Trail up to Granite Park Chalet with no particular plans for a hike. After considering a number of attractive options, we decided on the one that led to our closest bear encounter yet.

As we came down Swiftcurrent Trail over the pass from the chalet, we met the bear. We were on the last of those cliff-hugging traverses, the one that runs down close to a mile into the bottom lands where a string of lakes, starting with Bullhead Lake, runs down to Swiftcurrent Lake and the Many Glacier Hotel.

At the top of that traverse, by the switchback, we met a man and his nine-year old daughter having lunch behind a rock. When we were a few hundred yards further down the trail, Zack, with his sharp eyes, spotted a bear coming up toward us from the bottom of the trail preceded by a hiker with backpack and white T-shirt in some of a hurry.

We shouted “bear” pretty loudly, but it seemed he already knew that. When he came the 100 or 200 yards up to us, he had his big backpack just on his left shoulder and his T-shirt was pretty badly ripped up and scratched on his right shoulder.

I asked if the bear had done that, and he said “no,” then went on to explain that he sat down to have his lunch and was alerted from cries below that a bear was coming up the path. He saw it was getting close so hurriedly grabbed his backpack and headed up towards us.

Well, the bear followed him and continued to approach us, so we all headed back up the trail. As the bear was gaining on us, and we heard you can’t, and shouldn’t, out run a grizzly (which it was), we turned to face it, making as much noise as we could.

Zack fumbled in my backpack for my bear spray, with myself positioned a little further up the path from Zack and the backpacker. So we all stood with bear spray at the ready, clapping our hands and shouting as it still came on.

When it was not many yards from us, perhaps 15 to 20 feet, it stopped and, casual as you please, climbed a few feet up the steep bank on our left and then passed uphill just a few feet above us, then came down and regained the trail and headed on up, much to our relief. We all started breathing again. The backpacker remembered that in his haste he had left his camera at his lunch stop, so he had to go back down and get it. As it turned out, his T-shirt had been chewed by a deer when he left it out to dry at a previous camp site.

We watched the bear go up the trail 100 yards or so when I remembered the man and his daughter behind the rock and realized it would be dangerous to have the bear surprised by them. So Zack and I headed up at my suggestion.

Zack’s memorable quote was, “I’m not sure what we can do to help them” even as he bounded up the trail much faster than I did. We were perhaps a few hundred yards from the rock, with the bear ahead of us, when the man and his daughter appeared coming down.

Despite our shouts of “bear,” they kept on coming. Apparently they missed seeing the bear in the little bends of the trail. As the man told me later, it was only when he saw me waving my big sun hat that he looked down and saw the bear. They retreated back up the path behind the rock at the switchback with a large waterfall behind them.

We followed up, too, uncertain as to the outcome. Well, just below the rock and the switchback, the bear easily climbed to cut off the switchback and resumed the trail safely above the man and his daughter, who as it turned out had been making all the noise they could, their bear spray at the ready, too.

We went up to meet the two, who were now holding hands and coming down to us visibly shaken by the experience. We asked the daughter if she would feel better if we all continued down together, and so we did. She got out a lot of emotion talking about the experience, what she could talk about at school and so on, including how thinking the bear would eat her she said, “Good-bye, Dad.” She also told us that when her father saw the bear, he said some words that she couldn’t repeat to us.

Down at the Swiftcurrent Ranger Station, Zack reported the sighting and showed the rangers a picture he took as the bear skirted around us. They knew her from the tag, a young female that frequents the area. One ranger wrote quite a report about the whole thing, while another phoned up to some other ranger station to let them know.

I have been close to a number of grizzlies in Glacier National Park, including a mother and cub who hung around our camp site at Hole-in-the-Wall all day but were too busy feeding to notice us unless we hollered. Then the mother stood up on her hind legs to check us out, and the cub mimicked her, kind of cute.

But this is the first time I’ve seen a bear continue up the same path right at us like that. Today, I bought a new bear spray to replace my 20-year-old can.

Jonathan Spatz lives in Pittsburgh, Penn.