I recently took the family camping at Fallen Leaf Lake, near South Lake Tahoe, pictured right.
Tahoe is bear country, which is always a bit more interesting (or stressful, per my wife) than normal camping. Bears have an excellent sense of smell, and they have been known to bend open car doors to get at Snickers bars or chips. They have also been known to mistake a human head freshly shampooed for a tasty melon. At least according to the Internet.
So I felt the need to mitigate some stresses from the experience, to make the family more at ease. We bought a Starcraft pop-up trailer a couple years ago, and although I am no longer a purist, it makes camping with our two boys (7 and 5yrs old) a bit more manageable.
Most of the time spent in the camper is at night, so I made two key acquisitions before this trip. Although the foam mattress in our pop-up trailer is OK if you are a kid, it can be brutal on an aging back. So I bought a memory foam from Costco to set on top. The other issue is the small heater on board tends to drain the trailer’s battery, and we end up with this annoying beeeeeeeeeeeeeep in the dark of night. And no more heat. For that, I rented a small generator. It was a Yamaha 1000 Watt- so quiet you could almost trip over it.
But sometimes despite your best efforts, things just work against you.
My wife does contract work. On the way out the door, literally, she got a call with a project. Counting the days, she would have 5 days to complete her assignment after we got home. Oh, and we’re camping in bear country, too, honey. So relax…
We did make it up with no problems. Last year we had limped up the mountain fully loaded with supplies in our four-banger CR-V, only to find a Raley’s 3 miles from camp. This time we got the supplies there, after racing up the mountain.
When the kids are involved, setting up a pop-up trailer can be difficult after dark. So in keeping with my theme of stress mitigation, we headed out early enough to arrive at 5. This left me enough time to set up the trailer and have dinner.
In bear country camping there are normally bear bins. These are large steel boxes with doors that require some hand dexterity to open and close. Dexterity that, at least theoretically, bears do not possess. I note that there is a tree in the line of sight between the trailer and the bear bin. It is a longer than usual trip to the bin, fire ring and picnic table. Which would be great if I were tent camping (site 109 for those looking for the perfect tent camping site).
Our friend Bob was nice enough to cook up a batch of clam chowder and even provided bread bowls.
After dinner, we made our way to the store for supplies. Gary, another one of our camping buddies, came along. With keeping the kids moving, plus a lengthy stay in the beer aisle for Gary and I in deep discussion about Trappist ales, it was dark by the time we got back to the campsite.
There was a rowdy group across the field from our campsite. Yelling, partying…. You know, being rowdy. My wife brought the kids into the trailer to put them down for the night. It was my assignment to pack the cooler.
So I have the back of the car open with the shopping bags and the ice and the cooler, and as I begin to dump the ice into the cooler, amidst the yelling it enters my consciousness that there is also the banging of pots and pans.
Bear!
They usually don’t come out while people are awake, but the ranger told us there was an “angry teenager” that didn’t scare easily. My razor-sharp wit fumbles to the realization that this wasn’t necessarily an obnoxious group of college kids I was hearing for the last five minutes.
So they continue to bang the pots and pans and yell, trying to scare the angry teenager away.
Away is a funny word. Vague of direction, but with urgency. I want you to go to a different place from this place, and I’m not particular about where exactly that is, so long as it is not near…. Oh, and go ahead and get started on that right now.
So I’m pouring ice into my cooler, with meat and cookies and snacks looking up at me from the back of the CR-V, as I am pondering the word “away”. Then I muse that “away” might mean across a field, where some poor schmuck is dumping ice into his cooler, exposed. I wonder if pouring ice into a cooler would be the way to “call” a bear, if ever one was wont to do so.
My pace quickens. The battle plan was to put the stuff needed later at the bottom and tomorrow’s breakfast on the top, to make it easy to get to what I needed, in order of use. Now I’m getting this crap in the cooler as quickly as my hands can move.
But I’m not worried, mind you.
The din quiets. The 100 or so foot walk around the tree to the bear bin suddenly looks like a mile and a half hike through dense forest. And I swear that bear heard my call. My headlamp peers gingerly through the brush and across the field, hoping not to catch the reflection of two eyes in the dark. With one swipe of the paw, my head could fall to the ground and peer out at the bear as he deliberates over the tri-tip or the chicken for his appetizer.
I make it to the bin after what seemed like 45 minutes (and was probably 45 seconds). As I lift the cooler into the bin, I allow one more paranoid thought of the bear taking me down as I fumble to lock the bin with the little tool attached, recognizing his last shot at dinner. But my hands prove steady under pressure and the bin is locked.
I realize I have survived my encounter with…… nothing. I tell myself I wasn't rattled, collect what is left of my ego and proceed to the trailer. It’s funny. I’m usually not spooked at all by bears, especially not Brown bears. They only want food. I guess it was just knowing there was one brazen enough to descend on inattentive campers, and he was not interested in overtures to go “away”.
