The Bear Encounters

I got to go on a ride-along with Ari last week and he took me out on foot patrol to go on a bear hunt!!! : ) As I mentioned in one of the earlier posts, the bears really love to come into town and knock over the garbage cans and do what ever they can to pry the locked lids off to get to the “food.” There have been a couple of times over the past two weeks that we have seen at least two different bears, at different times, right below our livingroom window. It's fun to watch them, especially because we are on the third floor! : )

Anyway, Ari and I are walking along one of the quieter streets down in Telluride, actively looking for bears…and suddenly, Ari whispered, “There he is!” Sure enough, there he was, just about fifteen feet away from us, all 300 pounds of him, just looking at us. : ) It was seriously one of the coolest things I have ever gotten to do! We followed him, giving him plenty of room, of course.

As we were following the bear, some lady in a car nearly hit me…it was kind of one of those, “I see you, so I’m going to speed up and pretend like I’m going to hit you on purpose, and then slam on the breaks because I think it’s really funny” type things. Anyway, needless to say, Ari went over to make a contact with her, and sure enough, she’d been drinking, so while he was dealing with her, I got to watch to bear as he toppled another giant garbage can over and then proceeded to jump up and down on it trying to pop the lid off. I stomped and clapped and yelled for him to go away…I am told that usually works…and it seemed to. I know it sounds like I am insane, but it’s so incredible, you can hardly help yourself, it’s quite surreal.

By then the bear gave up on that garbage can and ambled over to a dumpster that was locked up inside a ten foot high cedar fence enclosure. The bear then started to rip the boards off the fence until he could reach the lid of the dumpster and he flipped the heavy lid open like it was a paper plate! They are so unbelievably strong! By this time, I was about ten feet away from him. On my walk over I had grabbed a large orange traffic cone, it was the only thing around and I figured it could help me make loud noises to scare the bear off…well, it eventually worked. There was a tense moment when the bear was staring at me considering whether or not to eat me. Ari later teased me that the bear was saying to himself, “ I could totally take that girl, she'd make a great snack; except for that stinking traffic cone!!! They get me every time!”

In retrospect, I probably wouldn’t be quite so brazen, but it was still the coolest things I’ve gotten to do in a long time!