Up close
Wild people have always made me more nervous than wild animals, but I am quite a coward about animals. Just ask my friends about me getting trapped in the latrine with a porcupine outside the door.
My favorite camping areas are frequented by black bears when the wild food picking isn’t so good, or they get trained to come down out of the hills for the garbage bait someone left out for them. My closest encounter with a bear problem was in Gunnison Park, Colorado, on a family camping trip when I was in fourth grade.
We traveled to Colorado from west Texas every summer, seeking relief from the heat and brown countryside. Our favorite place was Ouray, but in the interest of adventure, we tried other places as well. We had a camper on our pickup, with two narrow beds that folded out, and a light metal trailer tent. We carried all our food in a thick styrofoam cooler bungeed to the tongue of the trailer. After an overnight at a KOA campground, we arrived in Gunnison Park late at night, and all four of us just slept in the back of the pickup, Mom and Dad in the bed, my brother and I in the side foldout beds.
In thin gray light about 4:30 a.m., we were awakened by a gentle rocking of the pickup. Bleary eyed and looking out the lift-up window at the back of the truck, we were witness to a large bear dissecting our styrofoam cooler for his prize - a baked ham Mom had prepared at the campground the day before. Side dishes included eggs, bacon, and probably a little styrofoam. We watched him from our relative safety only a couple of feet away for about 10 minutes before he finished and was on his way.
I still have a chunk of styrofam cooler with deep claw gashes in it.
