The Night the Bear Ate Ed’s Nuts
I have been fortunate to be close friends with a wonderful group of like-minded folks who love to tramp around in the woods. We’ve had a number of adventures together in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and one summer a number of years ago decided that it was time to explore the Adirondacks of New York. So I put together an itinerary over the course of two weeks, and off we went.
Prior to our trip, I had done some reading about the area. Once thing I noticed right off was that the ADKs seemed to have a bit of a bear problem. None of us had ever sighted a bear in NH, so I called up the ranger to ask him what was what. “No problem!” he assured me. I asked if we should bring a bear canister. “If you know how to hang your food, you won’t have any problems,” he replied. While this was not in accordance with what I had heard, I took him at his word, as I did in fact know how to hang a proper bear bag.
The first night out, the group gave me a great amount of grief over how much I futzed about how and where we hung our bear line. I explained what I had heard about the bear problem, but this was just laughed off. After all, we had never had any problems before, and we were all experienced backpackers, right?
The next night after a full day of backpacking, we found an empty shelter in the Flowed Lands and proceeded to cook a tasty meal. Roughly around 7 p.m. as we finished eating, we heard clanging and shouts and hollers coming from the shelter to the north of us. “Ha!” we said to one another, “They must not have hung their food properly.”
As we cleaned up after the meal, one of our group was having some GI issues, so I helped her set up for the night in a corner of the shelter. While doing this, I noticed the following message carved into the wooden post, “Information the ranger won’t tell you: No matter how you hang your food, the bears will get it.” My own stomach turned over as I read this missive. Then I thought, perhaps this person too did not know how to hang a proper bear line.
With these two warnings in mind, I insisted on helping to hang the bear bags after dinner, and my assertiveness about where and how to hang was again greeted with rolled eyes and claims of my being overly anxious. Regardless, we found a fine place to hang our bags (all 5 of them) and headed back to the shelter.
Not more than 30 minutes later, as we settled in to play Gin Rummy, we heard a loud clatter of pots and pans. My first thought was, “Holy crap, the bear line broke under the weight of the bags!” but then we all quickly realized what had happened. Everyone inexplicably decided to run right out to where the bear was pilfering our food, so I bravely stayed behind to tend to the fire. As I sat there poking the fire and rolling logs to encourage a bigger blaze, I could hear Kathy doing a spot-on imitation of her dog’s bark, while Allison (the one who had been sick earlier) channeled Zena the Warrior Princess. As both women ran through the woods letting out howls and screeches in the hopes of frightening the bear, I continued to courageously and silently tend the fire.
After what seemed like a long time, but what was probably only five minutes, the group excitedly reconvened at the fire with stories of heroism and daring-do. Apparently, their loud noises had successfully scared off the bear. However it ran while off holding one of our bags in its mouth as the other bags dragged along behind. The bruin finally let go when one of the bags got caught on a log. Our fearless crew hurriedly picked up the remaining unopened bags and gathered everything else they could find into their shirts, pants, and pockets: sausage, cheese, packages of oatmeal, bags of GORP, and freeze dried meals.
We redistributed everything into the remaining bags and shimmied up individual pine trees where we placed a single bag (thinking the bear might climb up to collect one bag, but would be unlikely to climb them all) and then cautiously feel asleep.
The next morning, we were happy to see that all the remaining food had been untouched. Ed and a few others went out to see what damage the bear had wrought. Ed discovered a few empty granola bar wrappers that had been poked into the dirt as the bear struggled to open them, revealing their gooey goodness. He also found an empty bag of mixed nuts that he had brought. The bear had got a couple of granola bars and Ed’s nuts. But that was all.
All-in-all, we got off lucky. And from then on, I had a lot of help assessing where and how to hang our bear bags.
