Encounters of the furry kind

Friday night we went hiking with our friends Tim and Rebecca and their children. We were planning to walk the Turnagain Trail from Potters Marsh side (at the RR section house) to McCue Creek. Great plan. We went to the section house side to park our cars and we were warned there was a mama black bear and her cubs in the parking lot. So up we went in our cars to check out the scene. Sure enough - there she was a very small bear and her babies were up a tree. The mama loped around a bit sat down and watched us, sniffed around some, pooped and then walked over to the tree and somehow summoned her babies down from the tree. The scurried down and the three of them went off into the woods. We got to watch them for maybe 20 minutes -I took pictures with my phone camera, but they mostly just look like dots in the distance and you can't even see the babies.

So we decided to start at the other end.

It took us about two hours to walk the trail and by the time we got back to the section house side we decided to not go down the path that would lead us to where the mama and her babies had been and went down the wider more used path instead. Great idea....in theory. It wasn't long before we saw her and the babies right on the trail! I was busy looking at all the debris she had dragged onto the trail and didn't see them until she'd already shoved her babies up a tree and was getting ready to climb herself.

We went ahead and headed the other way...not really into walking past a sow and her cubs if you knwo what I mean!

It was the coolest - we got to watch them for so long in the parking lot - and then ran into them at a relatively safe distance on the trail. That is the third time I have run into bears on that particular trail, so I wasn't too surprised, but I have never seen them that close for that long not in a zoo before. This year people have had a lot of bear meetings not nearly as 'fun' as mine, right now there are hunters trolling a trail where a brown bear with her two cubs has already mauled two people. It's been quite the summer for bear encounters.