Bears, bugs and heat

Maddie and I are back home after two days hiking in the mountains. A pretty wimpy trip, I think, but we had our reasons for coming back.

This isn't one of them, but the most exciting feature of our trip was the bears that we saw. I've never seen many bears in past trips. In some places I've hiked out west, they still get shot so they're pretty skittish. Which is just as well since grizzlies still roam parts of the Rockies that we've hiked, and I don't want anything to do with a grizzly. Abby and I did see bears in an almost empty campground in Shenandoah N.P. during a trip just after 9/11. But those bears were so tame, they almost didn't count - they cavorted and wrestled in the campsites around us, and the ranger told us to bang pots together if they got too close.

Yesterday, Maddie and I were hiking up a steep hillside to a knob where we planned to camp. I was zoning out, as I often do when going uphill, when Maddie crested a little rise, turned the corner, and stiffened as she does when she's about to chase a rabbit or a squirrel. I told her to wait and, as I caught up to her, I saw a brown thing about 20 feet away, just below the trail. "That's too big to be a squirrel," I thought, immediately followed by "Oh crap, that's a bear cub." I then spotted another cub about 5 feet further on, just above the trail. We never saw the mama bear because the cubs took off away from us, while Maddie and I immediately skedaddled back down the trail. After about 100 yards, we stopped and started singing, yodelling and generally making a lot of noise. Now, I don't mind bears, but I don't want to run into a mother bear who's protecting her cubs. We eventually headed on, still singing, and the bears were gone.

Then today, we reached a four-way trail intersection. As I peered down the other trails, not the ones we were going to take, I spotted a big brown thing in the trail about 50 feet away. Another bear. And this one was pretty big. As we started up our route, the bear looked up at us and bolted, amazingly quickly, into the woods away from us. And then, when we were almost back to the trailhead, I saw another medium sized bear down the slope about 100 feet from us. He seemed aware of our presence - after all, I whistled to see if I could scare him off - but wasn't too concerned and went on tearing at his tree.

So after years of no bears, we see four in a two day span. Like I said, I don't mind bears - except for a mother bear with cubs - but I don't need to be reminded that they're wandering the woods while I'm sleeping.

But that's not the reason we came back early. Instead, it was the heat (90 degrees or so) and the bugs. And not the gnats and mosquitoes which were really annoying as they formed little clouds around our heads, but were more or less tolerable. The main problem was the ticks. I hate ticks. Even if they didn't carry Lyme disease, they're nasty little critters. And we saw more ticks in the last two days than I've seen in my entire life. It started when I picked one off Maddie after we set up our tent. Then, when we got in the tent, they were everywhere. Not swarms of them, but every 15 minutes or so, I'd spot one on the outside of the tent. I don't know if we were under a "tick nest", if those even exist, in a tree, but it was amazing how they'd drop down on us. It got even worse when I started having to pick one off me every 30 minutes or so inside the tent and toss it out the door. Apparently, Maddie must have become a magnet for them (as evidenced by the fact that I picked about 30 of them off her when we got back to the car - astonishingly disgusting which warranted a bath when we got home and may necessitate a trip to the vet before Abby and the kids return), and she brought them into the tent where they meandered around looking for a better meal before settling on me. I had visions of waking up with a dozen ticks attached to me. While that didn't happen because none of them actually latched on (as far as I know), I still had a restless night, periodically feeling a tickle on my arm or leg at which point I'd turn on my headlamp, grab one of the suckers, and unzip the door to toss it out. It was almost indescribably unpleasant. I suspect that I'll wake up tonight reaching to pick some imagined tick off my leg. Given that I probably didn't get all of the ticks off Maddie when we got back to the car and the bath might not have gotten the rest, it might not be imagined, but don't tell Abby that.