Bearly there

Mosquito Lake at sundown

 Late in the afternoon last month, my friend Dave and I were sitting on the edge of the remote, sun-baked dirt mountain road to Pinedale WY, after the hellacious hike-a-bike up through the Union Pass area of the Great Divide route. We were having a snack when a man wearing a large Stetson approached slowly on an ATV and apologized for his dust. He looked like the Marlboro man. A rancher, we assumed.

He looked us over, then warned us that he had seen six grizzly bears in the area earlier that day. The bears were feeding on dead cows (apparently one of the bears was killing calves) and that it would be in our best interest to ride another 25 miles down the road to get out of their range, he said. This seemed like a reasonable suggestion to me.

But a few miles down the trail, we stopped to camp for the night at Mosquito Lake. We were worn out and didn’t have sufficient sunlight nor the will to travel farther.

To avoid attracting bears to our campsite that night, we carefully hung our food, aromatic toiletries, cooking utensils and trash high in a tree before retiring to our tents. I brought my bear repellent into the tent with me and soon fell into the deep sleep experienced by people who ride bikes up through steep mountain passes all day.

I awoke just before dawn to an eerie chorus of howls from wolves or coyotes but there was no sign of bears and the food bags were still safely hanging.

Mosquito Lake at dawn

It wasn’t until we were packing after breakfast that I discovered that I had forgotten to hang one item for the night: A large open bag of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky. It had spent the night beside me in the tent, in my hydration backpack. Even I could smell it from a couple of feet away.

I may as well have been sleeping on a slab of raw salmon or on a bed of bacon grease, I thought. I’m not sure what the chances are that a grizzly would attack somebody in their tent, even if they were wearing meat clothes like Lady Gaga.

But all authorities warn against storing food in a tent in bear country. Thankfully the bears had better things to do that night than harass a foolish gray-bearded cyclist who knows better than to tease them.