Bears

I’ve always known that there were a lot of bears here in Alaska. I’ve even gone out on purpose to look for polar bears. However, today I had my first completely unplanned encounter with a bear.

My friend Blanca invited me to go with her kids to hike Bald Mountain. However, when I got to her house she told me that she’s heard that there was a mother bear with a cub chasing people there. So we decided to go hike Thunderbird Falls instead. Neither of us had done it before, but it was close by and I’d heard it was pretty easy so we decided to go for it.

We had fun walking in. At the fork in the road we first took the one that went along the river and then came back and took the trail to the observation platform where there was a good view of the falls. Walking down my friend told me she was a little disappointed in the hike and had expected a little more. I also had to admit it was a lot shorter and easier than I’d been looking forward to.

Just over half way down the trail we saw a group of a few adults and a lot of kids we had passed coming back towards us. They were making a lot of noise and we could hear them saying, "just keep going back.” We got closer and they told us there was a black bear following them. They had seen a mom and two cubs. We didn’t stop to see anything, we just turned around and started going back the way we had come. As we were all walking along we were talking about what we should do. People were trying to call the troopers on their phones, but the reception was bad. There was no other way out. Luckily there were some houses with yards backing up to the train. So we decided to climb a fence. We found a place that would work and started handing kids over the fence. Then all rest of the adults climbed over. When we got to the front yard of the house we were finally able to get some reception for the phones. My friend got a hold of the troopers and we told them about the bears and that there were still people further up the trail. We walked down and around to get to the parking lot where the cars were. We hung around a while to see what would happen. Three cops, a wildlife employee, and a state trooper all eventually showed up with tranquilizer guns to try and scare the bear away. They did get all the hikers out safely, but we didn’t stay around to find out what happened to the bears.

Now that it’s over, I can look back and call it an exciting adventure.