The photo above was taken from the cab of our pickup truck with my husband’s cell phone camera last week, while he was attempting not-so bravely to scare this ~300-pound she-bear away from our trash bin. Obviously, she wasn’t impressed. The next morning he left for work and found her not 8 feet away, in the drive right next to the house between him and the truck. She ignored him when he waved his arms and told her to leave (using his ‘gruff voice’), so he reached back for the shotgun we keep handy these days and let off some birdshot with appropriately loud bang into the air. She retreated about 10 yards up the hill, then stopped, turned around, growled grumpily and came right on back.

The first time I saw her was just a couple of weeks after our sweet old dog died, leaving us without the good bear-protection barking dogs have always offered. I’d just gotten my first cup of coffee and started out to the back deck when I realized that very large furry thing at the bottom of the deck steps (maybe 15 feet from the door) was NOT a dog, but an escapee from the wildlife sanctuary of the National Forest just across the railroad tracks. Yikes! Now she thinks she owns the place, and has lodged her complaints that we aren’t feeding her well enough.

While this bear is beautiful in her ursine way, she is a dangerous wild animal. We don’t want to kill her, and it would be illegal for us to do so anyway – it’s not bear season. So we’ve called a friend who hunts, some animal control people, a wildlife biologist at a local university, and even talked with a federal game warden about our “nuisance bear” and how to get her to move on. We’ve received some contradictory information.

• We’ve stopped putting out trash, which she loves to shred even though we don’t toss food – I compost kitchen scraps and we don’t eat meat in any case. That means we have to do dumpster runs more often, but that can be accommodated.

• We’ve been warned not to use the shotgun on her even just with rock salt, as it may blind or wound her and turn a bad situation worse.

• We’ve been told to ’sting’ her with a pellet gun instead. It won’t break the skin but will smart and that may at least keep her away from the immediate house and yard.

• We’ve been told she’ll move on when the blackberries ripen, but there are more than enough blackberries here on the property to fatten her up just fine. I doubt she’ll cross the tracks, since once the berries are gone the apples and pears right here will be ripening. She’s counting on it, I’m sure.

• We’ve been told she might be pregnant, and has chosen our place to den-in because it’s safe and abundant. Great.

My family spends a good deal of time outdoors during the summer. It’s one of the reasons we live in these beautiful mountains. I’ve a half-acre garden going, plus the fruit trees and grape orchard, all right in the bear’s path from the ridge to the creek for water. We have friends and family who vacation here, usually camping in the back yard that is now right in the middle of the bear’s twice-a-day wanderings. She’s not bothered by number of people, flying frisbee discs on the course (which is now ‘her’ property), tents, cars, trucks or train maintenance crews. Ice coolers are no impediment to her hunger, and she’s not shy of begging (or demanding) whatever’s cooking on the grill or leftover by the campfire. Something has got to be done.

The bear population is growing rapidly, and those of us who live in the same locations that bears find most hospitable are bound to cross paths occasionally. The Asheville Citizen-Times reports that in my area of WNC bear incidents have “exploded” in recent years from 13 complaints in 1993 to 302 in 2008. And this was in a story about a woman in a nearby town who was injured just yesterday by a mama bear with two cubs who swatted at her little dog. In her own driveway. Yikes again!

Alas, the C-T also reports that wildlife officials won’t trap and release because there’s nowhere to put the bears – we’re saturated. Stay tuned to keep up with developments. She may move on, she may decide to give us some space, we may get a new dog who will convince her to move on, or she may have to be hunted. Meanwhile, we’re moving the company onto the living room floor this season, just to be safer than sorrier.

When my brother and I were children, we got to spend a couple of weeks every summer visiting our grandparents and aunt in Eastern Kentucky. They lived in town, but our aunt was a social worker who often traveled into the hollows and onto mountaintops to check on her clients, many of whom lived so far back in the woods there wasn’t an actual road into the homestead. Instead, there was often a mule path we’d follow, sometimes with fine limestone cliffs she’d let us climb just for fun. We learned about the plants, the animals, and had great fun helping at harvest, then got to sit at the crude picnic tables in these homestead yards and listen to the stories of the old folks.

A frequent topic for those old men was a legendary mountain man named Big Tom Wilson. He became a hero to my brother and I, and we often played in the woods pretending we were Big Tom-like mountain folk, seeking deer trails or following bear hollows through the rhododendrons to the mountain peaks, blazing trails and knowing everything about everything these abundant mountains have to offer.

Decades later my own family moved here to Western North Carolina where Big Tom is more than just a legend – he was a real man who played a significant role in the history of this region. He’s still got descendants here, I taught one of them in junior high a few years ago.

Big Tom was born Thomas David Wilson in 1825. He got his nickname by being a lanky six foot two in a time when most men were much smaller in stature. They say he killed 114 bears in his lifetime, and he knew the Black Mountains (the Seven Black Brothers) better than anyone alive. He married Niagra (Polly) Ray in 1852 and they lived in a 2-room cabin on the upper Cane River while he earned a living as a gameskeeper for a hunting preserve, as a farmer, hunter, fisherman and a mountain guide. It was as a guide that he played his strongest role in the history of the region.

Big Tom (right) at the waterfall pool where he discovered Elisha Mitchell’s body.

When Dr. Elisha Mitchell came to the area in the late 1830s to survey the Blacks for science, Big Tom was a young teen. He accompanied Mitchell on an 1844 ascent, one of the guides who crawled with him through bear hollows to the ridge to determine which of the ridgeline’s peaks was actually the tallest east of the Mississippi. In the 1850s, however, Senator Thomas Lanier Clingman made his own survey and designated a different peak (current Mt. Gibbs) to be the tallest. The disagreement evolved into the infamous Clingman-Mitchell controversy, and that ongoing fight sent Mitchell back to the Blacks in 1857 to restore his claim. He tried to descend by memory, but by then a man in his 60s, he got lost as night fell.

When Mitchell failed to return to the Cane Valley, Big Tom and other area guides and mountain men set out on a search. It was Big Tom who tracked Mitchell’s last movements from the ridge, and found him sitting upright at the bottom of a pool beneath a waterfall, where he’d fallen to his death. Mitchell was buried ceremoniously atop the mountain that still bears his name, and which was a few years later demonstrated to be the tallest mountain. Clingman, who had made the original claim, had to settle for a different mountain in his name.

Big Tom lived into his 80s, died in 1909. Today there is the Big Tom Wilson Preserve on the western slopes of Mount Mitchell, where a replica of his cabin and other historical artifacts are displayed inside the Mount Mitchell State Park.

No visit to Western North Carolina is complete without a stop at Mount Mitchell, a short climb up the observation tower, and a tour of the historical material kept so well by the dedicated Park Service guides. The entrance is off the Blue Ridge Parkway east of Asheville, and it’s open to visitors as long as the Parkway is open (closed occasionally during the winter). Bring a jacket, it gets cold at night. And the wind can blow strongly on the ridge, so be careful of your footing on the trails!

Links:

NC Parks: Welcome to Mount Mitchell
The Nature Conservancy: Mount Mitchell State Park
Hiking in Mount Mitchell State Park

People who choose to live in the countryside are bound to encounter bears, and most are no worse for the experience. Yet as the countryside becomes ever more populated, the number of bear encounters in more urban settings rises as well. The last installment provided some good links to information about the habits and habitats of NC’s considerable bear population, good to keep in mind whether you’re living in North Carolina or just visiting.

Bears are smart critters. They can become expert at cracking “bearproof” latches on coolers, cars and trucks door handles, garbage bins and dumpster lids to avail themselves of food. They readily learn to beg, pretty much like dogs do. They can put up some impressively aggressive bluffing in order to gain access to golf carts, campsites and your dog’s food. They’ve been known to walk right into cabins, garages, pubs, restaurants and even resort hotels, making themselves right at home.

There are stories about bears that move in to hibernate in the earthen basements of mountain cabins as well as inside the barns, spring houses and root cellars of backcountry homesteads. Advice from old timers familiar with bears (and chock full of bear tales) can be useful. During unexpected encounters they advise body postures, direct eye contact and the kind of dominant behaviors that tend to work well on aggressive dogs to scare them out of an attack. Of course, bears are pretty good at the same sort of behaviors, and often scare people more than people scare bears!

Enough bears are killed on North Carolina roadways every year to have the state engineering wildlife underpasses into road expansion projects. Not just in the mountainous region either, as most of North Carolina’s bears live in the piedmont and lowlands. Wildlife researchers estimate about 2 bears per square mile in parts of the state from Charlotte to the coast.

“It was a weekend camping trip to the Smokies back in ‘72,” Clint Thomas reminisced. “The boat [a Polaris submarine] was in dry dock in Charleston for refit and refueling, my buddies and I often made the 6-hour drive to the mountains for some R&R in those days.” Thomas is still wiry and fit, but not as young now as he was then.

“There were three of us packing along a trail into the backcountry for some non-suburban camping in the rough. An early summer evening rain was falling steady,” he said. We were getting really soaked, which didn’t help our mood any. When we first sighted the bear he was almost as grumpy as we were, started snapping his jaws at us and making front-paw jumps toward us where we’d frozen in our tracks.”

They were in no mood for a bear-fight, so the three young sailors headed off the trail up the mountainside directly for about a hundred yards, catching a further switchback of that same trail higher up. “We thought we’d put some actual distance between us and the bear, and kept on hiking for at least a mile along the trail as it zig-zagged up the mountain. By then it was dusk, so we began to pitch our camp and gather firewood.”

Thomas went to the nearby creek for water, suddenly found himself face-to-face with that very same bear. “He was big, more than 300 pounds,” he says. “He was perched somewhat clumsily on a big boulder in the creek, acting like he wasn’t happy at all to have us in his yard.”

Seems the men had neglected to envision the actual distance from the bear they were when they decided to make camp. Despite the mile or more of trail, the switchbacks gave only an illusion of distance. In truth they’d chosen to make camp just a couple of hundred yards from where they’d first encountered the bear. Thomas and his friends stood still, warily eying the perched bear.

“All of a sudden that bear took a flying leap off that boulder straight at us, graceful as a gazelle despite his size. We knew right then that he could have us in a moment, whenever he chose. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this bear wasn’t going to share his territory with us happily.”

They left the tent half erected, grabbed their packs and headed straight down the mountain in the growing darkness at a full gallop. “We got back to where we were parked in maybe a fifth of the time it had taken us to hike to the campsite,” Thomas laughed. “Funny how mountains can disorient you that way. You think you’re miles away but you’re really not.”

They spent the night uncomfortably in the car, drove home the next morning in what turned out to be a solid 3-day rainy period. “It wasn’t good camping weather anyway,” Thomas reflected. He says the three old Navy buddies tell their bear story whenever they get together, and in their own circle of family and friends more than 30 years later.

“A good bear story lasts a lifetime, you see,” Thomas gleams with an ironic smile. “And we don’t even have the scars to prove it!”

Links:

Victor the wrestling bear took on all challengers – and won

Most Bear Visits Motivated by Food and Lack of Habitat

The Bears Among Us