Bear training in British Columbia

Dispatch from Michelle Olson — July 14, 1997

Bill says "Grrrrr!!!"

When we woke up today we were all cranky. Maybe it was because we all went to bed too late. Or because of stress. When we made breakfast we became more civil. But the memory was still there.

Judd, Del, and John went to Golden after we had a class on how to pack a kayak. The trick is to put all the weight in the center and you can pack a lot of gear. It has twin cargo holds fore and aft, and you can put small items behind your seat and a dry bag between your legs.

You put all the gear you need accessible in a spare bag and tie it to the side. The back hatch has a pair of buckles to hold onto a pack or another bag strapped on the kayak. We put our backpacks on the back. While the adults shopped for last-minute gear and food, the kids stayed at the resort and finished odd jobs and walked the railroad tracks. The tracks ran right past our camp so we decided to try the time-honored tradition of putting pennies on the rails to flatten them. We were successful and also found a lot of coals that we used in a fire later that night.

When Del, Judd, and John came back we were ready to have dinner. Judd and John have brought a treat! Hamburger! It would be our last red meat for the trip. At 5:30 p.m., we had planned for the biologist Bruce McClellan to come. But the biologist lives 50 miles away in Revelstoke, on Mountain Time — so he'd be here at 6:30 Pacific. We took it in good stride and waited. A half hour later Bruce arrived with another wildlife biologist, John Flaa and we ate dinner.

After dinner, the biologist talked about the caribou and the grizzly bears. The herd in this area has about 400 woodland caribou, unlike the great northern herds of caribou which can run in the hundreds of thousands. The woodland caribou eat from the trees in the winter when the snow gets high enough and grubs in the summer. In the summer, they move in groups of 40 to 200 in the trees. Then in the winter, they move into the alpine level and onto the ice and snow.

Bruce has been studying the woodland caribou for the last seven years and has been studying grizzly bears for the last 20 years and is considered one of the top experts in grizzlies.

Adventure Grants winners are a favorite treat of black bears

The bears in the area that are brown are grizzly and there are also black bears. Browns (grizzlies) never attack you for food, only if you endanger their young. Blacks are smaller and more timid. On occasion, they will eat humans but it is rare. If confronted with a black bear, you want to try and fight them off, but with grizzly bears you want to play dead. As Bruce said, "You don't want to fight off a brown or grizzly bear because the grizzly will win".

You can easily avoid bears by making a lot of noise and staying in large groups singing or shouting to keep the bears away. If you see one BACK OFF! And let it go away. If all goes wrong and it does attack, you need to know if it is a brown or black so you can decide to fight or get on the ground.

After Bruce and John left, we quickly packed up and slept knowing we had a big day ahead. On the 15th, we'll paddle a few miles up — finally getting into the wilderness. The journey is underway.