BEAR ATTACK
A Warning to Leave
By Laurie Wright & Family
We cleaned up yet another spot on the East side of Okanagan Lake to do some marine camping. We were located at the first small bay, on the east side of the lake down from the last new home construction. It has a nice little rock beach, shade during the day, and some protection from the north winds. We were all set up, after 2 days of work cleaning & clearing the spot, I spread ground pepper all around the perimeter of our camping area. This is something I have always done with bush camping. I spread it thick about 100 feet away from any of our equipment. It seems to have worked for us in the past, as most animals use their sense of smell and do not like the pepper smell.
Now it was time for dinner, we cooked on the BBQ, which was set up along the left hand side of our camping spot. There is a pathway going up the mountain right next to it. It was Wednesday evening around 6:00 PM. I went to get some more meat off the BBQ for the boys and looked up. Not 20 feet away from me was a black bear, we are guessing it weighed around 300 – 400 lbs. I just said, “Well, hello there”. The bear was going across the pathway above my pepper line and then stopped to look at me. My husband, Randy, looked up to see me looking at the bear. He immediately reached for the air horn and gave it a blast. This startled the bear and he moved a little bit to the right, still staying above the pepper line. My husband gave another blast of the air horn and the bear moved around our camping spot to the far right. We had our grandson, Ryan, with us and told him to get into the water and stay there until we called him out. Ryan could see further up the mountain from there and told us the bear had gone over to the other side of the bay we were in. We were all a little leery about sleep- ing there that night so we went
home for the evening. When we came back in the morning there was no sign of the bear or of him being in our camping spot. We had a beautiful day that day but we were still bear aware.
We stayed there that night and 2 more days and nights with no sign of the bear.
Saturday looked like it might be stormy, so we placed our locking bins inside Ryan’s small tent to keep it from blowing away. We came home for the evening and boy did it rain that night.
On Sunday morning we returned to find our camp spot literally torn apart! Ryan’s tent was trashed. It was torn to shreds. The bins were torn apart, food was tossed around and some was eaten. The coolers were tossed. It was a mess! The bear tore open the tent right where our heads would have been, pulled out the bedding, our tote bags, and even took a comforter and my husbands feather pillow, the one he grew up with.
We found the comforter halfway up the mountainside, but still haven’t found any sign of the pillow. Enjoying the pillow, Mr. Bear?
Next time a bear comes around our camping spot we will immediately
start packing up to leave. We were too comfortable in his territory and need to remember whose home we are visiting so take note of any warnings they might give us, like showing up to let us know they are home and they don’t want company! ◊
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www.suncruiser.ca I 2010 SunCruiser OKANAGAN
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