It’s an event that had my heart pounding and my adrenaline in overdrive. It’s a story of getting charged by a Grizzly bear mom with cubs while biking in Alaska. Certainly a lot of time has passed since high school, and since we’re out of Alaska, I guess I can now tell this story. I just couldn't make it public while still in grizzly bear country, but this is a pretty good story. So mom, here goes... | There are just some things I can’t tell my mother. Like the time I climbed the water tower after high school graduation, or the time my best friend and I were coming back from a motor-cross race and she fell asleep at the wheel and we did a 360 in a 4-lane highway, narrowly escaping a bad accident. But those were when I was in high school, decades ago. But just a couple of months ago, something happened that I also couldn’t tell mom, especially while we were still in bear country. |
We had enjoyed watching a beautiful young bear most of the day in different areas. She grabbed a salmon from the stream and ran across the road, dropping the fish –only to return later and whisk it off to the woods to eat. We watched her scarf berries along the side of the only lodge on this short road, and we also watched her swimming and fishing near the weir. As the daylight was going, we biked back to the campground but stopped to watch an eagle in the river. We had just mounted our bikes and I was in the lead. Slowly we began riding back to camp when I looked to my left and saw a bear tumbling out of the bushes onto the roadway about 25' away! She began huffing loudly and made two bounces forward on her front paws with angry teeth gnashing and hair around her face flying. She looked rangy, scrappy and mad. I immediately stopped my bike and said “hold on, we’re just humans; we won’t harm you.” |