Happy Ending

By now, most people reading this have heard the end of the story from me in person, so there’s not much suspense left. But for posterity, I’ll complete the written version. There’s a shortage of pictures for this final entry, since we were obviously preoccupied with the bears, so I’m throwing in this flower picture from the first day just for fun:

When I left off last time, Natalie and I had just had another bear sighting involving a mother and cub. We had backed up to consider our options and give the bears time to move on. We had last seen the mother bear under a tree just ahead of us to the left of our trail and the cub scurrying up a tree just a few steps to the left of the mom.

It was about 5:00 pm and we needed to make plans for the night. We were still game to spend another night out if we could find a good campsite not too far from Jackson, but we didn’t have a lot of time left and we were definitely not in a safe place. While we sat there waiting, Natalie read the pamphlet on bear safety that came with our big can of bear spray, which I had removed from its holster and now held at the ready, safety off. Among other things, she read that bears can reach speeds of 30 to 35 mph in a split second and can cover 50 yards in less than 3 seconds, so you should never try to outrun a bear. She also read they might make a huffing or woofing sound as a warning that they’re about to charge.

After waiting about 15 minutes without seeing either the mother or cub again, we considered it likely they have moved on, and decided to continue cautiously down the trail. I went in front with the bear spray in my right hand and my finger on the trigger. We walked slowly, talking constantly, and stopped every few steps to look around in a full circle.

We were just a stone’s throw from the clump of trees where the bears had been when we heard it – the moist, raspy sound of air being expelled rapidly through the snout of a large animal. Without ever having heard it, without having to think about it or discuss it, we instantly knew it was the huffing sound that warned of an imminent attack if we came closer. But it wasn’t coming from the spot where we’d last seen the momma bear just to the left of the trail. Now she seemed to be to the right of the trail, invisible among trees, but very close. We didn’t waste any time looking around trying to see exactly where she was. Quickly but without running or panicking, we took several backward steps, then turned around and walked steadily back the way we’d come, back toward the Granite Highline Trail and away from Jackson.

When we were well out of the bears’ personal space, we stopped and sat down again. Now what? We still wanted to head back toward Jackson, but there was only one trail and the bears were blocking it. The whole trip, we had avoided getting off the trails shown on our map because of our lack of hiking experience and my notoriously poor sense of direction. But there was no way we were going back down that trail. Assuming the bears had cleared out had obviously been a mistake – one we wouldn’t repeat.

As we pondered, I studied the map and noticed it showed a creek to the left of and parallel to the trail. This wasn’t the Cache Creek, which we wouldn’t reach for another half mile or so, but a much smaller one. I pointed it out to Natalie, and suggested we follow it until we were well past the spot where we’d seen the bears. It ran a little too close to the clump of trees for comfort, but not as close as the trail, and to maximize our distance we could stay as far to the left as possible without losing sight of it. Natalie was apprehensive and so was I, but we couldn’t think of a better plan, so off we headed through the knee-high underbrush. The picture below is the only one we took during our off-trail detour.

Again we walked slowly, talking and pausing frequently, alert for any ominous sights or movements or sounds. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only about 15 minutes, we hooked up with the trail again, safely beyond the bears. Even though we weren’t entirely out of the woods (pardon the pun), the crisis seemed behind us and we breathed a big sigh of relief.

Our decision on whether to spend another night out or head back to Jackson seemed to have been made for us. Within two hours, we’d seen three bears and been threatened by one. We were about seven miles from Jackson, all downhill, and in about an hour and a half we’d be on the wide section of trail used by bikers and covered wagons full of tourists. We picked up our pace and figured we’d make it back by about 7:30. I have to admit the prospect of sleeping in a real bed was pretty appealing.

As the end of the trail drew near and we started to come down off the adrenaline high we’d been on for four days, we realized how tired and sore we were. Later that night, we would go out to get a bite and pick up a few items from the store, and our feet would be so sore we’d have trouble walking normally. During those last couple of hours in the Gros Ventre, we talked about everything we’d seen and experienced, especially on that last day, and it occurred to us that seeing the lone bear up on Granite Highline Trail had been a blessing in disguise. Had it not been for that incident, we wouldn’t have been so alert, and might not have seen the mother and cub as soon as we did. After all, we had only seen them briefly, when the mother stood up and the cub climbed the tree. If we’d been looking at our feet, we might have kept coming until we were right on top of them.

We knew we were getting close to Jackson when we heard talking and singing from a loudspeaker. Apparently it was a party of tourists who had been taken out into the “wilderness” two miles from Jackson for dinner and a show. A few minutes later, with the trailhead almost in sight, we passed a few horseback riders in cowboy and Indian costumes killing time and talking. Apparently they were part of the show, and were either done for the night or were waiting to make their entrance.

The next morning, we stopped by the visitor’s center on our way out of town. Natalie waited in the car while I went inside to return the bear tube. The ranger who took it from me asked how our trip had been. I told him it had been great overall but went on to tell him about the bear sightings, especially the last one. He suddenly became very interested and asked me several questions about exactly what had happened. Then he took me to a map of the Gros Ventre hanging from the wall near the back, asked me several more questions and had me point out exactly where the last incident had occurred. He said he would radio the information to the rangers in the Gros Ventre. I asked what they would do with the information. He said they’d go see if the bears were still in the same area. Sometimes bears will hang out in the same place for several days if something is keeping them there, like a large animal carcass. If the bears were still in the same place, the rangers might close that section of trail until they moved along.

We did the trip back to Lincoln in one day, with only short pit stops. We had a lot of good conversation and the time went by quickly. Whenever we stopped and got out of the truck, our feet hurt and we walked gingerly. We got home about 1:00 am. Sam had made treats for us (lemon blueberry biscuits). Even though it was so late, we stayed up another hour and a half eating and talking and showing Sam our pictures.

The above picture was actually taken the morning we set out for Wyoming. Again, I’m throwing it in here because of the shortage of pictures from our last day.

Backpacking in the Gros Ventre was a great experience that we’ll always remember. We faced some challenges and made some beginner’s mistakes, but considering it was our first real backpacking trip, things went pretty smoothly and our preparation paid off. I would definitely like to do it again and Natalie says she would too. Maybe next time we can talk some family members and friends into going with us.

Bears Everywhere!

If you’ve been checking in on this blog to find out more about our bear sightings, you’re probably getting impatient. But the waiting is over. I’ve finally come to Thursday, our last day in the Gros Ventre and the day things took a more serious turn.

It was not actually supposed to be our last day. Our plan was to hike all day and find a campsite from which we could get back to Jackson by early afternoon on Friday, leaving ourselves time to clean up, shop a little, and have a relaxing final evening in town. The most direct route back was less than a day’s walk, so we decided to go back only as far as the trail that led northeast back to town, then turn the opposite direction and hike a couple of hours up the Granite Highline Trail. After seeing the bears Monday night on a wooded hillside above our first camp, we associated bears with woods, and the Granite Highline Trail looked like it offered plenty of open, unforested areas for camping.

By early afternoon, we were on the Granite Highline Trail and climbing steeply. At one point we looked back and discovered we had an unobstructed view of Jackson, some 11 or 12 miles away, at the end of a long valley with mountains on either side and the Cache Creek flowing down the middle. We hadn’t had any luck getting reception on my cell phone since entering the Gros Ventre, but I figured if we could get a signal anywhere it would be here, so I turned on my phone and it alternated between one bar and none. I called Sam, started talking and lost her, called again and lost her again. We tried texting and that worked better – probably because it only takes a split second of reception for a text message to get through.

As we climbed higher, the trees grew fewer and the view down the valley behind us opened up wider. In the picture below, you can barely see Jackson, just to the left of center, in front of the dome-shaped hill.

Near the top of the ridge we’d been climbing, the trail came to a hollow filled with snow. After skirting around the edge, we couldn’t find the trail. Around and around we tramped, looking for any sign of it. Eventually we found a clear path with a more southerly bearing than we’d been on, but still with a good claim, we thought, to being the right trail. Even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter, because we decided we’d gone about as far as we’d planned to, and we started looking for a campsite. We had trouble finding just the right place. At the top of the ridge the wind was too strong. Most other places were too steep, or the vegetation too thick.

We had just settled on a place in a small depression where there were a few square feet of nearly level ground when we spotted a lone bear slowly ambling up the ridge not far from the very trail we’d climbed a few minutes before. When we first spotted him, he was about 150 yards off. He seemed to be foraging, taking a few steps, then burying his head in the thick vegetation to munch on something, then advancing a few more steps. He was aware of us but any concerns he might have had seemed to be outweighed by his enjoyment of whatever he was eating.

We got back on the trail and moved away from him until we were fairly sure we were out of his personal space, then turned around and watched. Although my heart was pounding, I had the presence of mind to ask Natalie for the camera. In the bright sunlight, I couldn’t see the bear on the screen, but I aimed in the right general direction and snapped this picture:

Can you see the "bear dot" near the top, a little left of center? It was hard enough to see in full-screen view before I uploaded it, but in this smaller version it's almost impossible. Here it is again, enlarged and cropped:

Still not very impressive, I know, but trust me when I say he was much closer than he appears in the picture. We could see him distinctly and were acutely aware that, at full bear speed, he was only a few seconds away. He seemed in no hurry and continued to forage, slowly climbing up the ridge, occasionally looking our way. After several tense minutes, he turned around and headed back down at a leisurely pace, pausing less often to nibble than he had on his way up.

I’ve been referring to the bear as “he” only because it was not accompanied by cubs, but for all I know it was a female. I think it was a black bear, but there again I’m not sure. There are grizzlies in the Gros Ventre. In any case, after we lost sight of him, we didn’t exactly breathe a sigh of relief. Just as when we’d spotted the mother and her cubs on our first night, we had to decide whether to stay put or pick up and move to another place where we could indulge the illusion that there were no bears. The situation was a little different this time in that it was earlier and we had not actually pitched our tent yet. Our theory that we were less likely to encounter bears out in the open had been blown. Although we were a good distance from any trees, we were apparently surrounded by plants that were on the bears’ diet.

We opted to relocate. Since we didn’t want to go further from Jackson and extend the next day’s hike, we headed back down toward the trail along Cache Creek that led to Jackson. We were aware we might be following the bear we had just seen, but the odds that he was taking the same path seemed small enough.

As we came back down Granite Highline Trail, we were models of the “bear awareness” wildlife experts preach. We talked loudly to warn any bears of our approach, kept our heads up instead of staring at our feet, and I walked in front since I carried the bear spray. Although we were preoccupied by thoughts of bears, we weren’t totally oblivious to the natural beauty around us. I loved the stands of aspen trees we often came across, and we saw several that afternoon. They are especially beautiful when framed by a forest of the lodgepole pines that are everywhere in the Gros Ventre, as in these pictures:

The above pictures was taken shortly before we made it back to the start of the Granite Highline Trail. We were maybe 100 yards from the intersection, talking loudly and keeping our eyes peeled, when I saw a black bear stand up and look at us from a clump of trees to the left of the trail just a little past the intersection. I pointed it out to Natalie, and an instant later, she saw a cub scurry up one of the trees near the mother. After standing to see us, mom went back down on all fours and took a few steps to the right, placing her even closer to the trail. After that, we couldn’t see her; the undergrowth was too tall.

I couldn’t believe we were having another bear sighting less than two hours since the last one, and our third since the start of our trip. Like the first, this one involved at least one cub and a protective mother. But unlike the bears in the earlier episodes, these were directly in our path. Or at least they had been. When last seen, the cub was climbing a tree and mom was just a few steps to the left of our trail, a couple hundred yards ahead of us. How were we going to handle this one? We backed up about 50 yards and sat down to think.

To be continued…

Gros Ventre Continued - Lost Trails and Llamas

A little after noon on Wednesday, about the time we had decided we should turn around, we came upon a large wetlands area between the trail and Granite Creek to our right. The reason I say it was a wetlands is that our map said it was, otherwise I might not have known. It was a wide swath alongside the creek stretching into the far distance, covered by a dense growth of bushy waist-high plants. It appeared to be nearly impenetrable, and we didn’t venture into it, so I can’t say what else lived there or what exactly made it a wetlands.

We took this picture shortly before we turned around and headed back up Granite Creek the way we’d come. We would have preferred to travel in a circuit, but our map didn’t show any trail or combination of trails that would get us back to Jackson without backtracking in the amount of time we had left. Our plan, as mentioned in my last entry, was to backtrack only as far as an unnamed trail shown on the map that branched westward and connected with the trail that had taken us to Turquoise Lake.

Our plan was in some doubt now, because on our way down Granite Creek, we hadn’t seen the cutoff to this trail. But this time we watched for it carefully and found it after about an hour. It was a faint path, and the small wooden sign that marked it was tacked to a tree instead of a post like the other signs we had seen at trail intersections.

From the beginning, this trail was hard to follow. At several points it was so indistinct we weren’t sure we were still on it. There were no ranger’s horse tracks to reassure us. Fallen branches had not been cleared nor cuts made in trees that had fallen across the trail. Where it was wet, there were sometimes cloven hoof prints that we were fairly sure had been made by llamas. In my preparation for the trip, I had learned on-line that the Sierra Club was offering a llama-supported hiking trip through the Gros Ventre about the time we would be there, and John and Diane had told us there was a group accompanied by llamas somewhere about. Diane kept referring to them as the llama people.

After about an hour of painstakingly following the barely-visible trail, we crossed a small creek, went up the rise on the other side, and the trail just stopped. We went back to the creek, found another potential trail, but it quickly disappeared as well. After circling around for 15 or 20 minutes, we finally found a narrow part in the undergrowth, but it headed south rather than west. Nevertheless, we took it, since it appeared to be our only option. After just a few minutes, Natalie pointed and called out, “Look, llamas!” Sure enough, we had stumbled upon the llama people! Or at least their llamas.

Seven or eight of them watched idly as we approached. We didn’t immediately see any signs of people, but after following the trail around the hillside where the llamas had been turned loose to graze, we came to a place where two creeks converged, and on the far bank sat an elderly man.

He was deeply tanned, with a scraggly beard and a weathered look that made it clear he was at home in the outdoors – not one of the tourists. He waited as we changed into our spare shoes, forded the creek, changed back into our hiking shoes, and climbed up the bank to where he sat. His cap said “Al’s Llamas,” and when we introduced ourselves he confirmed that he was indeed Al. In a few words, we told him how we came to be in the Gros Ventre, and he told us he was guiding a group of hikers for the Sierra Club. He also gave tours in the Wind River Range, but this time of year he preferred the Gros Ventre because Wind River was crawling with mosquitoes.

We never actually saw any other members of his party, just a couple of their tents. I pulled out my map, showed him the way we had come, and told him about the trouble we’d had following the trail. He confirmed what we suspected, that we’d gone off course. He pointed northward where our trail was, or should have been, high up near the top of a ridge. The trail that had led us to him was one only he and his llamas used as far as he knew and was not on any map. He gestured southward over his shoulder and told us his trail would take us back to Turquoise Lake before too much longer. Natalie and I considered our options. I was apprehensive about trying to follow a trail that wasn’t even on the map when we’d lost one that was, and in the end we decided to go back and try again to pick up the elusive westward trail. We thanked Al and he wished us luck.

That evening, having failed again to find the trail we wanted and gone back to Granite Creek and from there hiked all the way back to Turquoise Lake and from Turquoise Lake climbed about an hour back up the slope we’d descended the day before, and having made camp high up on a windswept hill with a view in all directions, we looked down the hill toward the northeast and saw…Al’s llama camp, less than half a mile away. We had walked about four hours to get to a place we could have reached in 15 minutes if we had continued southwest on Al’s private trail.

After we’d pitched our tent and while we were trying to decide where to make our kitchen and hang our food, along came the two rangers we’d met the previous day. We walked out to the trail to greet them. Meeting people in the wilderness is so different from meeting them on a city street, so novel and unexpected. Ignoring them is out of the question. We talked to them about where we’d been and what we’d experienced since seeing them the day before. When I told them about losing the trail, the young lady ranger explained it was a trail that wasn’t traveled much since it didn’t lead anywhere in particular, and wasn’t maintained regularly. She wasn’t surprised we’d lost it and that made me feel better.

After the rangers left, we lit our stove and started water boiling. The hill we were camped on had a few widely separated clumps of trees and was otherwise bare except for a sparse growth of ankle-high white flowers, which seemed to grow everywhere in the Gros Ventre, but especially where nothing else would. We poured the boiling water into a foil pouch of freeze-dried chicken teriyaki and rice, which turned out to be the best meal we had on our trip. I had only bought one of these freeze-dried entrées because they were pricey, but ended up wishing I’d bought several. The food-hanging was easy that night because one of the trees in our kitchen area had a good branch at just the right height, not to mention that we were getting better with experience.

To be continued...