7/7/04

Sunday I saw three bears.

Walking back from Marble Valley along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) about 3 hours after I'd broken camp earlier (but still late) in the morning after an unhurried breakfast. Imagine a steeply pitched roof, maybe a 60-degree slope, and I'm walking across the pitch of that roof. Only I'm the ant on the roof and the trail I'm walking is only 17 inches wide of sandalwood-colored dust and rock on an otherwise emerald covered slope that climbs on my left side 500 feet above my head and falls below my feet another 600 feet to my right. Big, chunky outcroppings of pale grey and white marble push out of the slopes above and far below me, here and there, pillowed in the green, I can see acre-sized drop fields of marble fallen from the mountain's side.

Wildflowers are everywhere and more abundant and more varied in type and color than I've seen anywhere else. All of a sudden, everywhere, there'll be lemon yellow flowers that hang from their stems like little 8-petaled stars, each petal tip pulling back on itself until they sometimes curl into a full circle. And, among them, scarlet and vermillion Indian Paintbrush and then suddenly it's all Indian Paintbrush, and then just acres of purple lupine, and millions of tiny blue Forget-Me-Nots with infinitesimal yellow O's at the center of each. And white flowers, and orange flowers, pale lavender phlox and dark red who-knows-what. And it's not just the flowers, it's just about everything that's growing. The skunk cabbage's big, fluted leaves curl and spiral out of their central stems in a Van Gogh-like, almost hallucinatory frenzy. There are several places along north-facing slopes where I have to cross snowfields, sometimes several hundred yards wide, and where the snow has just retreated the ground looks absolutely dead and lifeless. The immense weight of the snowpack has crushed last year's growth to a complete, grey-brown flatness that follows each and every contour of the rock underneath. The crushed stems of last year's growth makes it look as if the ground itself is plaited together in a giant, chaotic basketweave. But just inches from where the snow melts away and aware of the minimal time alloted for maturation and reproduction, the new growth --inch-long shoots of fat crimson-is pushing out everywhere from the dead basketweave, turgid in maniacal iterations, the tip of each already crowned with a thick dark leaf-cluster that 2-feet farther from the snow and 6-inches taller are already starting to billow out to make the most of the long days of the short summer. They'll grow on stalks several feet tall in a single summer and be pressed into another millimeter-deep layer by next winter's snow.

The flowers and vegetation crowd the trail and as I walk the hum of the small alpine bumblebees is everywhere. I have to constantly brush aside butterflys that dance along the slopes in the same profusion as the flowers. Big tiger swallow tails, yellow ones and whites, viceroys and red admirals, little yellow and blue sulfurs; as many and more as the flowers. In the dust of the trail grasshoppers land clumsily before me and sensing my oncoming footsteps, leap into the air, uncase their yellow and black wings, and snapping like a furious little string of firecrackers propel themselves another 10-15 feet ahead. This sequence happens over and over until one frenzied flight or another randomly drops them into grass or bush to rest and catch their tiny grasshopper breath.

There are also many places along the trail on this slope where it's densely wooded. Big, 10- and 12-foot diameter Douglas firs, incense cedars, larch, lodgepole pines and others. In the space of a stride or two I'll pass from a wide, 100-mile vista with blued mountain ranges in far retreat to deep shade and dense forest that feels as intimate as a bedroom. In the forested sections it's much more quiet, too. Besides my footfalls on the trail the only sound I'll hear is the song of a bird or the deep hammering thrum of a woodpecker working an old tree. I stop as frequently to listen for the quiet, unnoticed sound in the forest as I do to breathe in the consciousness-expanding grandeur of the open spaces.

Around 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday I was just on the cusp of leaving a forest section when I stopped to look around and listen. I'm not sure whether it was a sound or a movement sensed out of the corner of my eye that made me turn. But there, about 100 feet below the trail and about 150-200 feet from where I stood, walking calmly and gracefully through the trees was a beautiful, big black bear heading uphill. He (or maybe she) looked to be about 350 pounds, maybe more, deep blue-black fur rippling across ample muscle. And completely oblivious to my presence even though I'd just walked above him on the trail not a minute earlier. I watched him walk until he was hidden behind some big trees and brush. I kept my eye on the spot where, judging from the direction he'd been walking, I guessed I'd catch sight of him again. In less than a minute the bear emerged right where I'd thought he would. But there was something about the light that made him look different. Smaller, and brown rather than black. As I watched the bear continue to walk up to the trail I heard, still hidden from view, the unmistakable sound of someone else casually ripping the bark off of deadwood to check for insects. Ah. Must be two bears. And, soon enough, the first bear I'd seen, the big black, came out following 50 feet behind the brown and along the same uphill route.

In a few moments the brown, who seemed to move just a little more stiffly than the big black, reached the trail. The way she moved (and her smaller sized which indicated a female) made her appear older to me and in my mind I imagined that she was an older sow and the big black was her adult offspring, still hanging around with mom. Who knows, but that's the way I perceived it and I liked that picture. She was still about 100 feet from where I stood watching and neither seemed to be aware that I was there at all. She continued slowly down the trail in my direction and the big black turned back down slope a little ways to nose about underneath a deadfall. Where I stood on the trail was a little lower than where little brown was walkingand when she was about 50-60 feet away from me I doffed my purple hemp baseball cap to let her know that she had company on the trail ahead.

She did (and I've seen this twice before and it's totally endearing) this wonderful little double-take. Absolutely delightful. I could almost see the "Huh?" thought bubble over her head. "Wait a minute; you weren't here a moment ago." She looked at me. Wheels turning slowly. She looked back down at big black who was still busy about something in the grass. She turned and looked at me again. Still there. She glanced back at big black who now decided to head back up slope. She looked at me again. And then, deciding caution was the better part of valor, she got off the trail and walked upslope until she was behind a couple of trees where she continued to check me out from their protection. Big black had walked along the trail, too, and he still hadn't seen me, but by the time he got to where momma was he just followed her up slope. I don't know if he ever knew I was there. They both started to nose about the grass and trees, little brown glancing in my direction every once in a while for visual confirmation that I wasn't doing anything more unexpected than I already had. After a few minutes of this very special nothing-special I turned to leave. As soon as I did, another black bear that had been ahead of me and a little bit below the trail (and I assume watching me the whole time-but maybe not because my back was to him the entire time) pivoted up on his hind legs and just bounded downslope as fast as you can imagine. It was like watching this huge furry black ball bounce down hill about 200 yards before I lost it/him in the trees. And this is a 60-degree slope he's dealing with. Amazing.

It was another few hours before I reached the trailhead where I'd left my truck three days earlier. Good trip. I'll fill you in on the rest of the walk another time.

Hope all is well with you and life continues to delight.

rbear

 

4/5/04

It's probably an old logging road, or once was, as most of these wilderness tracks are. A jeep could probably do it now, but that's about it. It's very narrow and rutted deeply from runoff erosion. It's mostly hardpack dirt (with bedrock showing in a few spots) and gravel in the deep ruts, but in a couple of places it's deep, sandy dirt. Hard to pedal then. In a few places water has pooled but mostly the trail is dry. It winds up and into the hills with an occassional nice, fairly level part where I don't have to work so hard.

Almost right away I see a coyote running ahead of me on the trail. At least that's what I think it is at first. But it's only a jackrabbit. They get so big, and their coloring is identical to a coyote's that it was easy to make the initial misidentification. It bounds away downslope and I see it a moment later, now far below still loping along at an easy pace. As I go further in and as the trail heads into the canyon's draw the scrub and brush give it up as the forest starts to close in on the trail. Big conifers-lodgepole pine, incense cedar, Doug Fir, spruce, and once in a while hemlock, all mixed in with dark, crusty-barked scrub oak still leafless as well as smooth-barked, camoflaged grey-green birch pushing out almost chartreuse-colored leafbuds. It's cool and pleasant and the breeze is soft and fragrant. After a while, with big trees still all around, a little meadow, maybe a long acre or so, opens up to the south on my left (I'm heading in a more-or-less westerly direction as the trail serpentines up the little canyon). I hear water. I drop my bike in the deep grass and heading into the meadow walk to the edge where, down a small embankment, a thin little creek is falling all over itself, in a natural hurry to get to some bigger version of itself. (I think it's Gold Creek, actually; down below in town it flows diagonally between two homes right in front of my little apartment, passing through a culvert under the street, opening out right on the other side of my neighbor's home and then meandering on through a little park to meet up later with the Shasta River downtown.)

On the opposite side of the stream from where I stand the slope climbs steeply through thick forest and big trees. My side, though, is thick with new grass and a few old oaks. Looking away from the creek, the far side of the meadow is bordered by the trail I'm riding and more forest. I can only see a little stretch of the creek as it's very crooked and there's a fair amount of brush and vegetation all along. I step down through some bushes, duck under some low branches and stepping onto a wet patch of rocky mud stoop down to splash some water onto my face and head and neck. The water is cool and clear. Nice.

I walk back up into the meadow and follow it up as it follows the creek. My bike is about 50-60 yards away from where I stop, about half a football field or so away. I can't quite see it because it's just laying on its side and there's a few trees and vegetation blocking its view. But I know pretty much where it is. I lean up against one of the biggish rocks that stud the meadow and soak it all up. Sights...scents...sounds. Perfect stuff. I can hear the water but can't see it because it's lower than me and there's still lots of brush hiding its particulars.

Sitting there I hear a sound kind of like the sound a bathtub drain makes when you first pull the plug, but only much deeper. Kind of like a deep, deep gurgle. Sort of. I can't quite place it but the idea springs to mind that maybe the stream flows through some old section of ribbed conduit or something. Or something; that's all I could think of. But I hadn't heard it before, so that puzzled me, too. And it had only lasted for maybe, what, 10 seconds? So I got up to walk over just to check it out. It couldn't have been more than 10-15 feet from where I'd been resting.

As soon as I stepped in that direction I heard it again. But this time it was louder and very clearly a deep, and a long growl. Very deep. Like a basso profundo organ note-constant, unmodulated, only going up a little at the very end for emphasis. Felt almost as much as heard. It lasted for about 10-15 seconds. And then, once again. It was like I'd crossed some invisible line drawn on the ground and this was the first (and final) notice regarding going any further. I'd obviously invaded someone's personal space. I don't know if it was a bear or a lion; in my mind I'm sure it was the latter. There was something about it that sounded much more feline than ursine. Something rolling deep in a belly that was king cousin to purring. Well of course that held me up right away. I looked and looked but couldn't see anything. No movement. The water continued chirruping but now there was the growl, too, and louder. I backed away and started to sidestep down the way I came and away from the stream, glancing down so I wouldn't trip on a rock or something. I kept myself oriented towards the growl so as not to be surprised. As I backed away it continued on a couple more times then stopped. I stopped, too, and again tried to make out something through the tangle but still couldn't see anything but brush. The level of the stream was maybe 5-6 feet below my feet, and like I said I couldn't see the water with all the vegetation, so pretty much anything could have been down there. One final growl indicated that it was time to clear the area. And I did.

After 15 or 20 sidesteps I turned so I could locate the bike down at the bottom of the meadow, but I kept turning back to make sure there still wasn't anything to see creekside. When I got to the bicycle I saddled up and headed back down, looking back over my shoulder for reassurance that no one was interested in checking me out any closer. I hadn't been paying attention to tracks at all on the way up but after bouncing along downhill for a couple of hundred yards and past a few bends in the trail I stopped and started to check the trail. There were some old tire tracks from either bicycles or maybe a dirtbike. A little farther down I did see a few bear tracks, set in old mud now rock dry. They had to be at least a couple of weeks old. No lion tracks.

It would have been great to actually make sight of whatever it was I heard. I felt wonderfully alert but not scared at all (or not that much, though I'm sure that if my growler felt the need to get visual rather than just giving me a verbal the relative values between alertness and fear might have shifted a bit.)

The thing is, hunters and other folk like myself roam this area all the time and people just aren't attacked by wild animals. I've talked to half a dozen folk who've seen mountain lions and though you have to be careful they have no inclination to mess with you if you return the consideration. This is just one of the reasons a place like this is so wonderful and desirable. This is one of the few places left where some of the original relationships between animals (and humans) established over millennia still exist more or less intact. It's a good, powerful, very alive place. What a treat it is to be here.

More news as it comes in.

rbear

 

12/8/03

I decided to run up to Paradise Lake and check it out. I hadn't been up there for a couple of months and even though it was raining pretty hard I figured I've got rain gear so I should go nonetheless. Of course, when I got in the truck I saw that all the mountains were snow covered and it was obviously snowing at PL (elev. 6400') but, what the hey, I thought I'd just see how far I could get. I've got relatively new tires and even though they're not snow treads or anything, well...I'd see what happened, right?

Well, naturally there was snow in the pass on the road even in the river valley along the Scott and as soon as I crossed over on the Indian Scotty bridge and onto the old logging road that heads up the mountain it was all snow with no tracks whatsoever. But the snow was slushy and not deep so I kept going, leaving nice, clean and wavy parallel tire tracks following me in the rearview mirror. I got about 4 miles in and up the mountain as the snow kept falling more and more and the road was getting deeper and deeper. There were several places where biggish rocks had fallen on the road from the upside and snow was settling on them like icing on cupcakes. I had to carefully thread my way through them. The clouds were all around and I couldn't see more than 50-60 feet in any direction. The trees were all dark with pillows of snow building up on all the boughs. At one point the grade of the road decided to up the ante and as I started up my tires started to slip. I stopped. No way to continue. So I started to back down, trying to stay in the tracks I'd alread laid down on the way up. It's just a single lane road once you cross the river with only a few places wide enough to turn out and I had to back down about a half a mile before I could swing the truck around.

I'd passed another road to a different trailhead, Boulder Creek (the same trail I was on when I had the mule-imitating-Sasquatch experience) on the way up to PL and when I got to that road I turned up it to see how far I could go on it. From that turn off to the BC trailhead itself is only 3 miles so I thought that, if nothing else, I could park the truck on the road and walk up to the trail. The road up to the BC trailhead is all rock and dirt (mud) and very steep and I only got a few hundred yards before I had to stop for the snow.

I got out, put on my pack (which only had my down jacket, a little camp chair, my stove and a Tasty Bites Simla Potatoes plus some tea and water), locked the truck, and headed up. The snow coming down was pretty wet and the snow under my boots pretty slushy, at least at first. The forest and ridges around me had just enough snow to make everything look like an electron microscope image. Every planar surface more or less parallel to the plane of gravity had a few inches of snow but on the sides of the rocks and the fallen trees and underneath them it was just dark and wet. Everything had a dark shadow of no-snow where the snow either hadn't fallen or had melted. The standing trees all had a dark shadow of wet leaves and dead ground cover that no snow had encroached and the light was non-directional, evenly filtered by fog and cloud cover so that it was the snow itself that imitated the fall of light. Cool.

As I walked up the road the snow fell more and more. Big thick conglomerates of flakes so that everywhere I looked there was this soft, slow falling scrim over the dark greens and liquid browns of the trees. My glasses fogged up if I stopped to watch and as the snow got deeper and deeper on the road my footsteps made satisfying crunches kind of like the sound that creaking leather makes but deeper as my weight collapsed the new snow underneath my tread. That sound and the vibration through my boots with each step were the only things in my awareness that was keen; everything else had a dreamy, floating softness about it. I walked on and up into the snow. It kept on falling heavier and heavier but never hard. There was no wind. Everything was still and quiet. The road would go on and up more or less straight alongside a ridge, just snaking back and forth a little bit in a lazy sine wave and for long periods I would walk with my eyes closed, thinking mantras and praying. Sometimes I stopped and wiped the water off my glasses, mostly just smearing my vision more so I kept my eyes closed for a long time just peeping out occasionally to see that I wasn't walking off into a tree or something.

Right before the BC trailhead the road crosses Boulder Creek and at that little bridge I turned off the road and picked my way among the rocks down to the water. I went back up the creek and under the bridge, took off my pack and got my things out. Sat down, started up my stove and heated up my potatoes and made tea, too. Watched the snow fall from underneath the bridge as I ate, with the sound of the creek, full with new water, filling my head. Under cover of the bridge a few rich green ferns poked out among the wet brown leaves and dark, mossy rocks. As I sat there the cloud cover lifted somewhat and traces of blue sky filtered through. Higher up the sky had yellows and golds as the sun, setting out of my sight, glazed higher clouds with light. I knew it would get dark in another half-hour or so but was confident that I could find my way down a snow covered road back to the truck.

The snow had stopped falling. As I packed up and left the shelter of the bridge, the sky, still fairly clear, was glowing in soft pinks and russets and the trees where I was standing, all in shadow and deeply covered in snow, were an otherworldy dark teal blue and deep lavender in contrast. I headed back down, following my own tracks in the snow. A few small animal tracks crossed mine but nothing else; I hadn't seen a single creature the whole time. It was interesting looking at my old trail where I guessed I'd been walking up with my eyes closed. It had a gentle meander to it but quite regular. It started snowing again after a while, softly. The light faded more and more and the landscape retreated into a foggy dusk. When I reached the truck it was dark and when I got down to the river and just before I crossed the bridge a nearly full yellow moon skidded out of the clouds and fell on the current and rocks below. I drove home along the dark river road, the defroster on and kirtans playing on the
cd.

That's all folks.

love,
rbear

 

 

reavismarek@onebox.com