T&T: Bears and cruising

[Faure, Marin]

The pepper spray is a great theory that you don't ever want to have to
try because the chances are it won't work.  A charging bear is hopped up
on adrenalin and has a lot of weight and momentum behind the charge.
Trust me, the bear will not do what a person does on "CSI" and stop and
scream and rub their eyes and run away.  The bear will just keep right
on coming only now it will be even more pissed off.  One swipe of a
brown bear's paw can take your arm off.  I've seen a brown bear take a
"casual" swipe at the back end of a pickup and he or she ripped the
tailgate completely off the truck.

The jingling bells on the shoes is better than nothing, although they're
not very noisy.  The most effective thing is talking, and fairly loud
talking at that.  The next best thing is a strange loud noise, which is
why the compressed gas boat horns beeped off every so often are so good.

If you're going ashore in bear country, don't wear perfume or deodorant.
We stink to bears and most other animals and you want to keep it that
way.

Another effective anti-bear device is your own nose.  If you're in the
backcountry and you smell rotting meat, it would be a good idea to turn
around and go back the way you came.  In brown bear country, the chances
are pretty good there is a bear "cache" nearby.  Browns generally don't
eat meat they come across or steal in one sitting.  They tend to eat
some and then drag the remains a short distance away and cover it with
leaves and stuff.  Then they'll go sleep off the first meal somewhere
nearby and come back later to the cache.

But the absolute best defense against bears, particularly browns, is
knowing where they like to hang out.  For example, if your taking a
spring cruise up the Inside Passage, be VERY wary about taking the
dinghy ashore at the creek mouths or deltas.  In the spring, both browns
and blacks need to get their digestive tracts up and running again after
several months of low or no activity. So they come down to the creek
mouths and chow down on the new, tall grasses that grow there.  The
roughage thing works every bit as well for bears as it does for us.
Over the course of many years we have seen dozens of browns and blacks
feeding in the tall grass of the creek mouths on our floatplane flights
up the Passage in June.

By the way, you'll never see browns and black in the same place at the
same time.  For whatever reason, they dislike each other intensely and
if they come across each other they'll most likely fight until one or
the other (usually the black) is dead or runs away.

If you've gone ashore and are hiking, avoid low, dense brushy areas or
tight groves of trees like willows.  These are favored spots for browns
to take that after-meal snooze I mentioned.

Bears make beds to sleep in.  I've never seen a black bear bed (I assume
they make them, too) but a brown bear bed is a fairly large, dished-out
depression in the ground.  They look deliberately made--  once you have
one pointed out to you you'll recognize them from then on.  If you come
across one, particularly one that looks freshly used, go back the way
you came.

Other precautions are pretty obvious.  If you see a bear cub by itself,
leave right away.  Mom will not be far off and God forbid you get
between her and the cub, or if you appear to be in a position that the
mother thinks threatens the cub.  And keep in mind that moms will
continue to protect their young even when their young have gotten pretty
big.  So it's not just the cute little "baby bears" you need to be
worried about.

If you cruise with a dog, leave it aboard if you're going for a hike or
fishing in a stream in bear country.  Unless it's one of those yappy
little rat-dogs.  Most people can't stand the sound of them as they bark
continuously--- bears are no different..:-)

And speaking of dogs, cougars are much more of a threat to a dog than a
bear is.  Bears are really lazy and generally won't attack an animal to
kill it (polar bears being an exception).  They much prefer to steal
meat from another animal like a wolf, wolverine, or cougar that attacks
and kills animals for a living. If a bear can't get meat he or she is
just as happy to eat berries or bulldoze the ground in search of bugs
and grubs.  The reason for leaving the dog aboard is that should a bear
be sighted the dog may well try to take it on and the end result will
more than likely be a dead dog.  Or it could motivate the bear to charge
the whole operation.

Fortunately, bears in their natural habitat where they do not normally
come in contact with people will go out of their way to avoid them if
they know they're coming and don't feel cornered.  Bear attacks are
rare, and they mostly seem to occur in places like Glacier Park in
Montana where the high volume of people have made the resident bears
somewhat less leery of them and often put people and bears on the same
piece of ground at the same time.  But while bears, like boats and
planes, are not inherently dangerous, they are unforgiving.
Particularly if they decide that your presence is not in their best
interests.  And don't be fooled by the lumbering, rolling run of a bear.
We were being "investigated" by a bear years ago in McKinley Park in
Alaska.  A bear can barely see its paws in front of its face (well,
their vision isn't quite THAT bad) so they tend to come in real close to
investigate something its nose and ears do not identify as an immediate
threat.  So we're standing there with our blueberry pails and this 800
pound (we learned later) grizzly is standing on its hind legs about 30
feet away mulling us over when something spooked it and it turned and
ran off.  It looked like it was running in slow motion, but in only a
few minutes it was miles away across the valley.

The old joke about how you don't have to outrun a bear, only the person
you're with, is true to some extent but if the bear has decided both of
you need to be out of her life, she will easily run you both down in
turn.  They are amazingly fast.

There are plenty of good books about bears, how to avoid them, and to
act around them if you come across them.  If you're anticipating a
cruise through bear country it would probably be worthwhile to take some
time and learn more about them if part of your plan includes going
ashore at interesting but remote places, stream fishing, hiking, etc..
They're really cool animals, and if you see one, particularly a brown,
it's a magnificent sight.  The reality is that, if you act sensibly in
the backcountry--- and this includes the islands and mainland coast of
the Inside Passage--- you have more of a chance of being hit by
lightning that being confronted by a bear.  So it's not something to
really worry about.  Like that spare raw water pump for your Lehman you
keep in the parts locker, you just want to be prepared should the need
arise.

Up north, you're in far more "danger" from the mosquitoes, no-see-ums,
and horse flies than you are from the bears :-)

______________________________
C. Marin Faure
GAB-403 "La Peruse"
Bellingham, Washington