Post #144: There are three bears in this picture

A couple of weeks ago we came home to our campsite at Crandell Mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta.  On the way up to Crandell we stopped where many vehicles were parked and saw a bear that was feeding in a meadow just below the road, my first ever clear sighting of a bear in the wild.  Ten years ago on a small road on Manitoulin Island I did glimpse a large-ish dark shape that ran across the road ahead of us, which Lorraine told me was likely a bear, and one was spotted on Beattie’s lawn in Maitland years before that, but not by me, so this bear, a rich golden brown, was truly my first confirmed sighting.  I was excited, and even more so when the young women in their Parks uniforms, who informed us that it was in fact a black bear despite its coloration, said a mother with two cubs had been seen farther up the road.

So we watched this bear mosey around the clumps of bushes and then headed on up to camp to cook our supper.  I was boiling water for pasta on our little Coleman when the brilliant, hawk-eyed Lorraine, who as an Albertan has much more bear experience than this effete Easterner, pointed out bears, a mother and two cubs, on the slopes across the creek from us.  It was hard to believe that she had picked them out, this medium-sized dot that moved on the mountainside with two tiny dots that kind of bounced around behind her, but she did, and we watched as we waited for the water to boil.

All of the camp and picnic sites in Waterton had signs with strict instructions about wildlife proofing nailed to the picnic tables.  If you left anything – dishes, scraps of food, coolers, cookstoves – out on the site, you risked both attracting bears, cougars, or wolves and being evicted by Parks staff.  I recognized their seriousness and took it seriously, not wanting any of the above, and especially the bears, sniffing around our site and our tiny tent.  So I kept checking the progress of the bear family down the slope towards us, wondering what might happen after dark, and drained the pasta water very carefully, not wanting a single piece of macaroni left on the ground.

As we ate and as the light dropped, the bears disappeared into the woods at the left of the picture and, I hoped, headed up the little valley instead of down towards where we were, perhaps the closest campsite to them if they chose to follow the course of the creek our way.  I wondered about them as we crawled into our tent, after assiduously cleaning every speck of food remnant from the table and the site (and hoping the other campers were as careful), and hoped that they wanted to keep their distance from us as much as I wanted to keep mine from them.

We did survive, and I did have a great night’s sleep on Lorraine’s patented two-tier seniors’ sleeping system and woke up to another day when my bear experience would be increased incrementally by a much closer encounter; however, that will have to be the next instalment in our camping/exploring adventure in the great West.