Bear!

For the first couple of years that I was writing this blog, the focus of our travels was primarily city-based. You know...museums, food, notable buildings, history, sports, that sort of stuff. Things that are related to human beings and the settlements they create and things they spend their time doing. We spent lots of time in Europe, visited Morocco to check Africa off the continents list and hit some cities in the United States. Sure, we dipped our toes into nature a bit by walking on a glacier in Iceland and exploring Everglades National Park in Florida but we spent most of our time on asphalt and concrete and not so much in the natural world.

Then we visited Southern Africa in August of 2015 and our travel plans started to shift. It seems like at least half or maybe more of the time we've spent on the road since that trip has been spent outdoors. Hiking or driving in jaw-dropping natural places or chasing wildlife have become some of our favorite things to do. Our California trip in late June this year was a bit of both of those travel styles for us: some time eating and wining in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys preceded by some time immersed in the great outdoors in Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

As we do every time we head into a National Park out west, we hoped we'd see some wildlife being genuinely wild, but we knew in the three parks we picked to visit that our options would be more limited than some of the other parks we've visited on the left side of the Mississippi River. These parks are not stocked with elk or bison or moose like Yellowstone or Grand Teton or Rocky Mountain. There are also no grizzly bears or wolves roaming the Parks' real estate. Yes, there is a grizzly bear on the California state flag but it's been over a century since there's been a grizzly seen in California.

That meant we'd be hoping for birds, bighorn sheep, mountain goats and black bears. We thought it unlikely we'd find any sheep or goats in the Sierra Nevadas and the birds that are resident in the parks didn't excite us overly much. So we pinned all our hopes on bears. Yep, we were relying on the animals that we barely saw in previous travels in Colorado and Wyoming and Montana to make this trip an animals trip. We are fools, I know.

We got so lucky.

If you had asked me before I started planning this trip where I thought I was mostly likely to see a bear, I would have said Yosemite. I mean, have you seen the old black and white movies from the '50s and '60s of people feeding bears from the windows of their cars in Yosemite? While I didn't figure there would be rampant, unabashed hand-feeding of bears, I figured maybe there would be some around. Yosemite seemed to be the place for bears. Sequoia is just about big trees, isn't it? And honestly, I'd never even heard of Kings Canyon until I started mapping out the trip. 

It had to be Yosemite that we'd see the bears, right? Right?

We didn't see any bears in Yosemite. There are bears in Yosemite National Park. Somewhere. As there are in Sequoia and Kings Canyon. We just didn't see any in Yosemite. In fact, after researching all three parks and planning the route for this trip, we actually planned on coming up empty in Yosemite. It just didn't seem like there would be any spot that we'd be visiting that stood any sort of halfway decent chance of seeing a bear.

The bears park on this trip (post-planning) was supposed to be Kings Canyon. It sounded to us like Zumwalt Meadow at the very eastern part of the Park would be the ideal place to head first thing in the morning and with a handful (but not too many) of other early bird tourists, we might spot a bear or two foraging for berries or grubs or whatever in some gorgeous Sierra Nevada Mountain meadow, lush and green from the winter and spring snow and rains. It sounded like an idyllic picture postcard view of nature and one of America's greatest alpha predators.

Crescent Meadow, Sequoia National Park.

Zumwalt Meadow was closed. So was most all of Kings Canyon National Park. The winter of 2023 was brutal in the Sierra Nevadas in terms of rain and snowfall and the after effects of all that water included a few roads here and there being out of commission when we were hanging around California in late June. No bears in Yosemite. No bears in Kings Canyon either. We were left with Sequoia for the bears.

Can I say how unbelievably gorgeous Sequoia National Park is? We went to Sequoia to see those trees that have leant their name to the Park but there are some spots of supreme beauty in that place that aren't defined by sequoia trees. Those picture-perfect meadows that I imagined at the end of the main road running down the middle of Kings Canyon? They exist. I don't know whether they exist in Kings Canyon but for sure they exist in Sequoia. They are just amazingly peaceful, bucolic canvases. And when they are flush with snowmelt, the grass is so green in the morning sun. They truly are amazing. I cannot recall being in a place much more gorgeous and I'm not being melodramatic here.

When we found out Kings Canyon was effectively shut down, we had to find an alternate Zumwalt Meadow in Sequoia National Park. We picked Crescent Meadow. It sounded like an adequate substitute. Meadow. Mountains. Trees. Remote. End of the road in a National Park. Rather than setting off first thing in the morning for Zumwalt, we'd head to Crescent Meadow. We figured we'd get there at about eight and grab one of the few spots in the parking lot near the Crescent Meadow loop trail and set off for a walk with very few other (but enough to provide a lifeline in case of an up close bear encounter) people to see if we could find a bear. And if not, it would be a good walk anyway.

The Crescent Meadow loop trail sounded perfect by the way for a morning hike. Flat, rated "easy" by the Park, 1.6 miles and a loop, which meant that we'd only get so far away (0.8 miles in fact) from the parking lot. Effectively after we got halfway through the hike, we'd be getting closer to the car with every step.

We got to the Crescent Meadow parking lot at about 8 a.m. after leaving our hotel about 2-1/2 hours before that. We got one of the last spots (so lucky), grabbed our water bottles and camera and looked for the trailhead. Crescent Meadow loop signs pointed both left and right. We picked right. It looked greener and we'd been heading in that direction already.

So we are not 10 minutes into our walk and we see a bear. We honestly thought there was no way we'd see one and less than a quarter of an hour since we left the car and started walking, we saw a young black bear foraging in the sunlight at Crescent Meadow. Are you kidding me? This was fantastic. How lucky were we? We thought the chances of seeing one of these animals was super remote and about the moment we left our vehicle we find one. So lucky! We watched him or her move across the Meadow at a leisurely pace before disappearing from our view. So good. We are strong believers in getting up early to see wildlife and it for sure paid off in 2023 in Sequoia.

Our first bear of the trip is shown in the two pictures above. He (or she) looks mostly black in color, although the sun makes the fur in the back look a little light brown. Could be the light or it could be just a patch of brown fur. Black bears are not always black. They can be all sorts of shades of brown or even blond. It was a black bear for sure because the only bears in the park are black bears so there's really no debate to be had here. 

It is so special to see wildlife in the true wild. This bear was amazing. This had to be a good omen. Plus it was small, so in the unlikely event that it had come near us and attacked us (don't laugh!), I think we could have taken him. Or her. We watched it move out of sight and decided to move on.

The Crescent Meadow loop trail runs around its namesake meadow before heading into the woods. We kept going and going until we felt pretty sure we had traversed all 1.6 miles and should be getting back to the car. Only...no car. No car park either. No nothing. End of trail. I thought this thing was supposed to be a loop? 

I don't know if we did something wrong or what. It didn't look to me like we missed any sort of turn. So we did what (I feel) anyone would do in a strange place with no cell signal: we turned around and started walking back. We thought we were done and would be on the road again. Didn't happen. Now we had about a mile and half hike back the way we came. My estimate. Could have been less but I don't feel it was.

And that's when we saw the two bears.

Bear number three, Crescent Meadow loop trail, Sequoia National Park.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time hiking in bear country. I've found myself off in the woods or on a trail a couple of times in my life in spots where bears might live or be knowing really pretty well that the chances are super remote I'd actually see a bear. But seeing two of them just a few hundred feet away moving through a meadow at some speed was a bit unnerving. I mean here we are by ourselves (where the heck were all those people who had parked in the parking lot???) in the middle of nowhere with no cell service and no bear spray and with two bears within sight. And they did not look small. I'm not sure we could have taken one of these bears, let alone two.

To make things worse, we are now moving away from the two bears back along the trail we walked to get to the dead end that was supposed to be the end of the loop. You aren't supposed to turn your back on bears and move away, right? Isn't that just like running? I have to admit I was shaking at first. It was a little difficult to focus the camera zoom on these animals when we first spotted them. This is some next level, what-the-heck-do-we-do-here type stuff. I mean, what do we actually do here? Other than move away back along the trail and hope we weren't noticed.

And yes, despite the shock of seeing two pretty good sized bears with nobody else around a nothing but nature between us and them, I still kept taking pictures. Why would I not? I have to blog about this, after all.

Still...pretty nervous on this one.

We were fine. Of course we were. Everything was absolutely fine. They either didn't see us or didn't smell us or just didn't care. And we weren't stupid enough to do something like bring a turkey sandwich or something like that on the hike with us. We walked around the trail back to the car and moved on. Nothing to see here, folks. But it got the blood flowing first thing in the morning for sure. I have never been in this situation before and I'm honestly glad we saw these three bears, including the last two. It's now a treasured experience despite the nervousness on first sight. Now I can say I've seen a bear in the wild pretty close to me with nothing between me and it. That's more than I could say in May of 2023.

Bear number two running (top) and bear number three (bottom), Crescent Meadow loop trail.

As a signature bear experience for this trip, what we saw on Crescent Meadow loop was just fine with me. Sure, a better bear encounter would have been stopping a bear charge by making myself look big and ferocious and have the bear walk away looking defeated, but I was really very much OK with this experience. Plus that other scenario has way more of a chance of going seriously wrong. Three bears in one hike? I couldn't have hoped for anything more. Really. This is as many bears as we saw in a full day in Rocky Mountain National Park in June of 2020 and one more bear than we saw in six days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks later that same year. And all this took place in the first two hours we were in the park. 

Early bird. Worm. That's all I really have to say here.

But we weren't done with the bears.

If there was a meeting with a bear that I'd hoped to have in California last month, it was exactly what we had at Big Trees trail later the same day in Sequoia. Gorgeous green meadow, lone bear moving very slowly through the grass looking for food and enough people around to feel like there was no danger whatsoever. That's exactly what happened. The Big Trees trail was one of the highlights of our trip to Sequoia because it got us a great look at a variety of good-sized giant sequoias. The bear was just a bonus.

And the enough people around to feel like there was no danger is an important factor. Not that it was really needed. Hey, I like security blankets, what can I say? Either that or all I really need to do is run faster than the slowest person, right? 

We lingered on the Big Trees trail for maybe 20 minutes watching this lone bear root around for whatever he was interested in near a smallish non-sequoia tree. There was not a whole lot of action. Not like the two bears running we saw earlier in the day. And that was fine. This was the last bear we'd see in Sequoia. Right before we saw this one, we found another jet black bear in the woods just maybe 50 yards off the Big Trees trail, but he split before we could get a picture.

Wild animals are difficult and unpredictable. You can plan and plan and plan all you want but there's no guarantee that a bear or moose or elephant or some sort of bird or any other living creature is going to cooperate and show up and stand still enough and pose so you can get some signature shot to put on your wall or add to a blog post or just throw on your hard drive and have it never see the light of day ever again. We've had some disappointing wildlife days. Sequoia National Park in 2023 was not one of those. Although it really was supposed to be Kings Canyon. Good thing it was closed. Sometimes being prepared and having backup plans gets you the result you want anyway. It sure did for us in California this year.

Two last bear pictures. Big Trees trail, Sequoia National Park.