Please Bear with me!

At last...My Bear Pics!

     When I first arrived into the region, I saw a Grizzley dart across the road a couple hundred yards ahead of me on a back road leading into Kitwanga. BC stands for Bear Country and it was the first of about 100 bears I saw in the next 7 weeks and but it was the only Griz. And a Griz without a doubt, I feel very fortuante to have seen it. It was like, I went through hell to get there and this Grizzley sighting on the first day was my just reward.
      I pulled the car over where he had entered the brush but it was too late, he was long gone, down the hill to the river. I realized then that I would have to have my camera ready to go at a moments notice.
     Almost every day I saw at least one or two black bears. Usually they would be 'browsing' at the side of the highway, nibbling on branches and berries. You could drive right past them and they would stay there. I was able to pull over and take some pics but at first it seemed like I was jinxed. The battery would be dead. The film would be stuck. Another vehicle would come by and scare the bear away. I even tried turning the engine off and coasting up to them. It seemeed impossible to a picture! And as it turned out, a 400 pound black bear looks more like a 40 pound dog from 100 yards away with a 35 mm camera!

After I took the next pic, I sat with my friend and had a beer and a snack. I noticed some movement in the rearview mirror. There was another bear behind us walking up the logging road in our direction! I thought 'great, as soon as it gets here, I'll get a grat pic!'. But he took off.

While driving back from Hyder, Alaska one day, a huge black bear ran across the highway right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and just missed it. I think a video camera mounted on the hood is a good idea. You never know what you'll see, I almost hit a moose another time.
At one point the fearless, foolish Captain Max snuck back for an upclose-and-personal shot of a browing bear. The small shot below is of me walking down the highway towards the bear, armed with only a small camera and a can of hi-test griz spray. He came up over the bank onto the highway and saw me across the road from him. I froze. He froze. We stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity. Then my friend honked the horn. So I ran away. I mean, the bear ran away and I ran back to the car without a picture.

Now for the most unbelieveable shots of all.

It was just after leaving a huge patch of Amanita muscaria in the Nass Valley that I encounterd a Kermodie or 'Spirit' Bear walking along the the logging road. This rare white sub-strain of the Black bear only exists in a small area of northwest British Columbia and to be blessed with a sighting of one leaves a memory to last a lifetime.
He came onto the road and sauntered up it like he knew he was a protected specie. I was out of film but my companion grabbed her camera and started clicking while he walked slowly away. She yelled 'Hey!' and he stopped and turned his head back to us. What a great shot, if only the camera wasn't out of focus and 100 yards away! The result is a couple of pictures that might just as well be Elvis or a Sasquatch.

It seemed impossible to get a good picture. On the last day, a bear ran down the bank as I drove by. I stopped and ran back expecting to see him running through the woods but he was at the bottom of the bank stuck between two trees only 15 feet away! I was out of film by then.

     When I got back to my little town, their was a bear trap by the dumpster behind our building. In the fall, we get lots of bears in our towns dumpsters. In the first week that I was back, they caught 3 bears in the trap in my parking lot. I actually watched a bear in the dumpster at suppertime from my window.
     One was a huge adult, a beauty. We have the biggest black bears in the province on Mt. Elphinstone and the Sunshine Coast because our winters are so mild sometimes they don't even hibernate. They just eat and eat on a multitude of fish and berrries and dumpster food year round!
     He sat in the cage with the stupidest look on his face, he would tilt his head sideways and grunt as if saying 'Wassup?'. I grabbed the camera. I pointed and clicked.
The flash was dead.