We had been in Yellowstone for three days and had yet to have the ultimate encounter of seeing a bear in the wild.
So now we were getting desperate.
We headed up to the Upper and Lower Falls to visit the waterfalls at the south end of the Yellowstone Grand Canyon as our backup reason for driving out that day.
We got good at spotting animal tracks, scat and the scratches left on trees but not necessarily who made them.
There are some fantastic trailheads throughout Yellowstone that follow along riverbanks and over prairies and to some spectacular land formations. We picked one that had a couple of entries within metres of each other and headed along the banks of a river. The trail seemed to fade out as we got further along the river and deeper into the forest. We saw deer and wolf tracks as well as somebody’s scat. We’d read that we needed to make noise as we walked so we didn’t surprised any dangerous wildlife so we sang and clapped and kept turning in circles to see if we were being followed. After we found more and more trees marked by bears we chickened out and headed back only to find the real trail with a nice big sign that said the entire area was closed to all visitors.
The proper start of the trail was in a picnic spot and a short exploration of the area turned up the leftovers of someone’s dinner, spinal column and pelvic bone surrounded by de-furred fur and some scat bigger than my foot.
Another trailhead started on the other side of the carpark with a sign that warned a bear had been seen only two days before. This has to be it! So after hours of previous hiking we set off again.
We climbed the gentle slope of a prairie on a well marked trail and were almost overtaken by a couple easily in their sixties. The higher altitudes of 6-8000 feet above sea level can cause symptoms of nausea, headaches, dizziness and shortness of breath. Luckily we’d only been suffering from shortness of breath when we exerted ourselves and climbing this prairie was definitely making it hard to breathe.
But the effort was worthwhile when we came across a thermal lake that had bubbled up out of nowhere, killing the unsuspecting pines that now all lay along the banks neatly lined up in death. The egg-y sulphur smell drifted from the clear green water as well as a hissing muddy pond with beautiful white clay.
A chat with our 60+ co-hikers, when they made it to the thermal lake, got our scat owners sorted out and it turns out bear scat looks like dog poo! So of course we were looking for dog poo the whole way back to the car. We actually found some and I continually turned in circles the whole way back in case a bear had decided on a closer look at our receding backs. But not even a chipmunk was interested in seeing us leave.
It was late. We still had some major traffic jams to get through on the way back due to road works. We finally decided that we just weren’t going to find a bear.
On the way out we saw buffalo in the same spot as the day before and deer in the same spot as the day before. Buffalo became a dime a dozen and boring by that stage and the only thing to pique our interest, but not long enough to take a photo, was a bull elk on the other side of the river.
And so my bear hunting days are over. Maybe one day I’ll come back this way. And maybe one day I’ll see a wild bear and wish I never had!
