Glacier National Park, Montana
Bears
I often seem to have issues with bears when I hike in the park. Once while I was on the loop trail from the Big Bend on Going to the Sun Road to the Granite Park Chalet, they closed the trail because of a female grizzly with two cubs bluff charging hikers. I passed through the area where the bears had been reported AFTER the bluff attack. If I’d walked between the mother and her cubs (i.e. if they’d been on opposite sides of the trail), I likely would have had a much closer encounter. At the top, a couple of hikers had set up a telescope and it was possible to see not only the bear that was menacing the hikers, but four other grizzlies that had dropped into the area to forge for food. Nothing like having five grizzly bears within a mile of you to make you feel like the woods are out to get you.
A second time, I was hiking to Iceberg lake with a group of tourists and a park naturalist. We spotted two grizzlies about two miles away on a slope above the trail. Two hikers, headed up to Swiftcurrent Pass (which coincidentally drops down into Granite Park), were below a small cliff that obstructed their view of the bears. They were headed towards a very unpleasent rendezvous, when the naturalist got us all to yell “BEARS!” really loudly. The hikers couldn’t understand what we were trying to tell them, but they figured that 20 hikers yelling loudly in a national park probally meant something was up. They turned back down their trail until they met up with us and only then did the realize who close they’d been to the bears.
over 5 years ago
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