Awesome Damage
People don’t realize just how powerful these animals are. When you consider adding panic to the situation, I can’t fathom just how much power even a young black bear could produce.
There is a video shown at the Yellowstone visitor center of human/animal interactions and my favorite is the one of the guy who tries to approach a bison, seemingly to make some type of physical contact. How he survived the fall from more than ten feet up in the pine tree is due mostly to the slowing effect of landing on the lower branches as he descended. Amusing only because he seemed to get away mostly unhurt. The buffalo seemed to be about as damaged as a semi-truck would be after an encounter with a pedestrian.
Rick
Advice. See that there is no reason
whatsoever why a grizzly bear would want to get into your car.
sorry
Don’t leave McDonalds in your car bro!!! lol!
seen first hand
About 30 years ago I and my fellow backpackers came back to the trailhead parking after a trek in grizzly country in the Canadian Rockies to find that a car parked near our van had a back door completely twisted and torn off the hinges. It looked like the bear had no more trouble entering the car than I would have opening a sardine can. There were huge parallel claw marks on the paint and sheet metal and the interior was trashed, with shredded upholstery and scraps of annihilated food packages and cardboard boxes strewn around the inside and a trail of cookies, chips and gnawed cans leading towards the brush. For the rest of our trip we cleaned out the van obsessively before we left it parked anywhere.
Willowleaf, it certainly would make
one think twice before leaving ANYTHING, even a crumb, in your vehicle when in bear country.
yes, indeed
We found a car wash in Banff and vacuumed the hell out of the van to remove any traces of food. Then we bought a small handbroom and pulled off the highway at a rest stop to go over the nooks and crannies we couldn’t reach with the vac hose.
The van had shag carpeting and we also found hundreds of marijuana seeds down in the pile and in the seat tracks – the van owner had bought it a few months prior to the trip from a hippie neighbor. I hate to think what would have happened when we re-entered the US at the trip’s end and Customs had found them! We collected them in a paper cup and dumped them into the brush halfway down a hill – we joked about the mystery pot patch that was going to blossom there. Maybe the local bears found and enjoyed it.
Even today I have had to modify my slovenly car housekeeping (got into the bad habit as a construction project manager of eating a lot of meals on the road in my vehicles, which became rolling dumpsters.) My boyfriend lives out in the country and when I first started parking my car up there over the weekends I would sometimes return home to find I had brought rodent hitchhikers along. Nothing wakes you up faster than getting into the car in the morning to drive to work, grabbing a fast food bag to throw in the trash and having a mouse jump out onto your lap.
And since he has recently had a black bear snooping around his front porch beside where I park, vehicular cleanliness is a must.
Hungry bears
Rangers in large Nat’l Parks tell me that bears have learned to identify human foodstuffs by SIGHT ALONE; if a peek into your back seat reveals brightly colored bags of chips, etc., they’ll pop a window to raid your stash, even if they can’t smell it yet …
Delphinus
Grizzly country
And that would be why I can’t get my wife to sleep in a tent up here.
Well then, just get…
…her really mad (“Hell hath no…”) and have her sleep in the Sequoia.
Better yet, throw in her mom and the B.C. bear population will take a migratory turn for the Territories.
Welllll, on second thought, it would probably be unbearable for all concerned.
Are Hennessy Hammocks known as Ursa’s people pinatas up there in northern B.C.?