Chris, Part 2 - Ira’s Bear Encounter

An episode in which we ride bikes, look for gold, and make new friends! 

August 28th, 2024- California Day 5

We were waiting around in a Mariposa parking lot, anticipating our bike tour with excitement. One of our bikes had malfunctioned, so our tour guide, Chris, had returned home to retrieve a replacement. The dawn haze was quickly baking away with the heat of the rising sun. It was going to be a hot day.

While we waited, Ira, the gold-prospecting companion of our bike tour guide, was entertaining our group with stories about his gold discovery. Just a few minutes prior, however, Chris had hinted at a scary bear encounter that Ira once had. I love a good bear story, so I was dying to hear Ira’s. When the conversation lulled, I asked him about it. A little smile crept across his face. He was waiting to be asked. Without preamble, he launched into the story. 

“When I went to Alaska, we went to a place called Katmai National Monument, a volcanic park where there was a huge eruption sometime around 1912. To get there, you have to be flown out in one of those little prop planes, and they take you out to the middle of nowhere. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had read a lot. I knew how you were supposed to behave around bears. Back then, they didn’t have anything like bear spray. We have it now, of course, and it works pretty good. But we didn’t have bear spray then. What we had was a twelve-gauge shotgun.” 

Ira’s eyes grew distant, reinvisioning the frontier that he had once explored. If you had put him in prospectors’ clothes then, he could have been transplanted straight out of the 1840s, frontier stories and all. 

“There were two of us that backpacked up to this area. We set up camp, and it was still early, so I decided to walk down to the lake -about a quarter mile- to catch some fresh fish for dinner. Well, we looked at each other and said, ‘What are we going to do about the shotgun?’ 

“We only had the one shotgun, and we weren’t going to be together. We eventually decided to leave the shotgun with my friend since he was staying in our camp. Then he could protect our food, our tent, and our belongings. We said to ourselves, ‘There’s been all this talk about bears, but we aren’t even likely to see a bear. No big deal!’ So we left the shotgun with my friend, and I walked down to the lake.

“On the trail to the lake, there were bushes and trees on either side. As I got nearer to the lake, I could see down the trail and see the lakeshore.” Ira looked around, then gestured at a box truck about 40 yards away. “It was maybe from me to that Cheetos truck, so not far. All of the sudden, I see a bear walk out of the bushes and onto the path ahead of me. So I stop. I think that the bear is just going to keep walking, but the thing is, bears have a super sense of smell.”

Ira’s eyes grew wide. “It smelled me. It turned and looked at me, and then it growled at me. I thought to myself, ‘Oh sh**, it growled at me. That was a huge growl!’ But it was pretty far away, so I thought it was going to keep walking. But no, no way. It turned and started walking up the trail towards me!

“Now, all the stuff that I had read and learned about said that you’re supposed to wave your arms, make yourself look big, show it that you’re not a deer or something, and talk to it. So I’m talking to this bear, ‘Hi bear! I’m your friend!’ and I’m waving my arms and stuff. The bear gets about fifteen feet from me, and then it stops. So I think, “Oh good, maybe it’ll go away. I’ve been talking to it, trying to be its friend. I’m a nice person, blah blah blah.’ Anyways, the bear opens its mouth and lets out this humongous growl. 

“Think about a German Shepherd growling at you. It weighs 70-80 lbs, has big lungs, so it sounds like blaghhhhh. Now imagine an 800-lb grizzly growling at you. It’s like a freight train. And it was like ten feet from me. So when it growled, I totally lost it. 

“There’s one rule they tell you about bears. It’s the biggest rule, it’s the most important rule of all. What do you do when you are confronted by a bear?” Ira leveled his gaze on me, eyes twinkling. 

“Don’t run,” I responded. My heart was pounding, imagining myself in his story. Not running feels like a joke. Who wouldn’t want to run when faced by an 800-lb bear?

“Don’t run,” Ira confirmed. “Don’t ever run. No exceptions. If a bear comes at you, you can play dead, roll up in a ball, protect yourself, but don’t run.” Ira’s hand sliced emphatically through the air. “Don’t run.”

“So what did you do?” we asked.

“I ran.”

We couldn’t help but laugh. He had built up the narrative tension perfectly. Here, in our safe parking lot, we could joke about his decision to run from the grizzly. In real life, I think we would have done the same thing. 

Ira defended himself valiantly. “You know, when I tell this story, I always ask people, ‘Well, what do you think you would have done?’ I mean, the bear growled at me. It almost knocked me over with the force of it. What would you have done?”

“I would have died,” one of our tour group members said. “I would have shriveled up and died.”

“Well,” Ira said thoughtfully, “Dying is one possibility.” 

“But did the bear chase you?”

“Oh yeah!” Ira said casually. “I turned around and I took off. As soon as I did, I thought, ‘Oh god, I wasn’t supposed to do that!’ But you can’t undo it. I heard the bear come after me. I looked over my shoulder and the bear was right on me. I thought it was going to kill me. But after a couple of seconds, it hadn’t knocked me down. I couldn’t hear it behind me. So I look back and see it had stopped chasing me and was just walking off. I don’t really remember what I did after that. But I’ve since gotten books on bears in Alaska, and it turns that half the time a bear charges you, it’s just a false charge. It’s just to scare you off. The other half of the time, well, they’ll throw you to the ground and rip an arm off. They’re unpredictable. So, anyway, I was lucky!”

The appropriate exclamations were uttered as we digested the story. Ira was an excellent storyteller. We all shivered in horror and laughed simultaneously. He was just that good. 

As Chris rolled up with the new bike in the trailer, Ira added an epilogue. 

“I don’t think there’s ever been a bear attack in Yosemite, but there is one interesting case I know of. On one of the popular trails in Yosemite, a lady and her son were hiking. They come to a little outhouse, so she decides to use it. She took off her pack and went inside while her son stayed outside to wait. Well, a bear shows up. It was just a cub, a yearling cub. The bear sees the little kid wearing his backpack and can smell the food inside. So the bear went for the pack.”

Seeing our horrified faces, Ira hurried to clarify. “He didn’t mean to go after the kid. He just wanted the pack, so he grabbed it. Well, the kid was wearing the pack, so he grabbed the pack with the kid in it. The bear dragged the backpack off into the woods with the kid screaming. The lady comes running out and there’s her kid getting dragged off into the woods. So she starts yelling, and then the kid falls out of the pack and the bear ran off with it. The kid was all bruised up, but the bear wasn’t trying to hurt him. He just wanted the food. If the kid had taken his pack off, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Ira’s telling of the story gave me pause. Unlike most bear stories, Ira’s featured the young bear as the protagonist. The hapless kid was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. All the bear wanted was a snack, not violence. I smiled a little. Despite Ira’s own scary encounter with a bear, he didn’t inflate it beyond what it was. He gave you the facts, plain and simple.

Ira was still storytelling. “You know, they say that if you leave granola bars in your tent or something, there’s a fair chance the bear will rip into your tent to get them. It would smell them. 

“I know one of the Yosemite park rangers that lives right outside of the park. She is always careful to make sure to bring her pack inside with her at night. She never leaves anything outside of her home to attract the bears. Well, one morning she comes out and her car has been all ripped open. She looks around in her car and you know what she found? A tube of toothpaste. It had been all chewed up. A bear smelled that toothpaste through her car and ripped it open to get it. I don’t think it needed to brush its teeth, but,” Ira shrugged, then pondered. Thoughtfully, he added, “You know, bears stink. They really smell bad, because they’ve been eating rotten flesh and stuff. Bears smell terrible. They probably should brush their teeth!”