Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park Read Online Free PDF

OBSTRUCTED . Some of the advice seemed fairly self-evident: AVOID BEARS WHEN SEEN . Good thinking. NEVER APPROACH OR ATTEMPT TO FEED BEARS. I could do that.
    The three of us decided that the signs themselves were almost as scary as the possibility of a marauding bear. This was our way of whistling past the graveyard. WHEN CAMPING , the sign continued, DON’T CAMP IN AREAS FREQUENTED BY BEARS . D’oh! DON’T CARRY OR USE ODOROUS FOODS . Other advice included: SLEEP 100 YARDS FROM FOOD STORAGE AND COOKING AREAS. . . . USE A TREE TO HANG ALL FOOD, COOKING GEAR, AND TOILETRIES: HANG THIS STUFF TEN FEET UP AND FOUR FEET FROM THE TRUNK OF THE TREE. . . . WHEN FISHING, DISPOSE OF THE ENTRAILS OF THE FISH BY PUNCTURING ITS AIR BLADDER AND THROWING THE GUTS INTO DEEP WATER.
    One bit of information was not entirely obvious on its face: AVOID CARCASSES; BEARS OFTEN DEFEND THIS SOURCE OF FOOD .
    This sign reminded me of a bear-and-carcass story. I related it to the couple as we passed the final signs and walked the flat part of the trail at the edge of Gibbon Meadows. I told them about the time I fell asleep while watching a grizzly that was less than 200 yards away. There was a carcass involved in the story as well.
    This is the way it happened. I voluntarily went with a friend to watch a grizzly bear feast on the carcass of something that had once been a bison. This was off trail, out in the Hayden Valley, over on the other side of the Great Loop. The bear was in a small dell—call it a basin—in the middle of a huge Yellowstone meadow, very like the one the couple and I could see from the trail, Gibbon Meadows. As in Gibbon, there were almost no trees to climb in the Hayden Valley. My friend Tom Murphy (who makes an appearance in many of my Yellowstone experiences) had been out “dinking around” the day before. About four in the afternoon he spotted a grizzly feeding on the carcass of an adult bison. At sunset it began assiduously digging a hole. The muscular hump on the grizzly’s back powered this steam-shovel action of its front legs. It took very little time—a matter of minutes—for the bear to bury the bison and cover it over with loose dirt. Tom knew his bear would dig the bison up the next day and feed again.
    That night he asked me if I wanted to go back up to the park to watch this culinary whoop-dee-do. I did, I really wanted to see it, but bears scare me badly, and I didn’t sleep at all that night. Not a wink. It hardly mattered because we were up well before dawn and had parked at a turn-off in the Hayden Valley very early indeed. The valley had once been an arm of Yellowstone Lake. Over the centuries very fine silt and clay were deposited on the lake bottom so that when the water retreated, the soil was almost impermeable, and very few trees grow there as a consequence. So, for instance, if you go there to see a ravenous grizzly bear devour the remains of the largest land animal in North America, you have no place to hide. There are no trees to climb. You are out in the open—and out of luck if the bear’s charge isn’t a bluff.
    Tom and I walked toward this bear, moving over marshy hillocks that sometimes quivered like jelly under our boots. We walked five miles, at a guess, through a herd of rutting bison, then dropped and belly-crawled the last few hundred yards until we came to the small indentation in the earth. Our only cover was a stand of sagebrush, maybe two and a half feet high. We hid there, upwind of the bear below, and I trembled in my parka.
    In this bear pit was a hole that looked like a big freshly dug grave. At sunrise the bear, which had been sleeping nearby, dug into the grave for a while, reached down, and with one paw—one paw!—flipped the bison up out of the hole and dropped it beside the grave. The carcass had to weigh well over a thousand pounds. The bear had buried it there for safekeeping.
    The grizzly began eating. He was an older male, with long white claws, and was