A grizzly sight

20th September 2012

This morning we got ourselves out early again, another 6:30am start. We didn’t see anything much in the morning mists until we slowed to a crawl past the place where the ravens were on the deer carcass. Lo and behold, there was a grizzly bear on the kill! We’d never have spotted him if we weren’t checking there carefully.

So we parked safely and walked back to find a vantage point on the slope on the other side of the road to watch. We were probably less than fifty yards from the bear, which was a tiny bit unnerving especially when it looked our way. Mostly it was busy burying the carcass under a heap of leaves, then unburying it to have another nibble.

It took maybe four minutes for another car to stop and see what we were looking at. Then another and another. After thirty minutes there were more than twenty cars pulled up in various ludicrous spots on what was a bend on a winding stretch of mountain road. People were gathered on both sides of the road, one lady with tiny kids making sure they had a front row seat (or possibly offering them as bear bait to attract it out into the sunshine for better photos, which would have been nice). We watched the bear cover about thirty yards in four seconds, chasing ravens off his kill, and as this didn’t seem to faze the closest spectators I can only assume most visitors to Yellowstone are much braver than they look. Or as dumb as they look.

Eventually a Park Ranger arrived and tried to move the stupidest vehicles. One of them filled the air with rubber-smoke as he discovered that he’d parked too far off the road at a steep angle. A horrible grinding noise emanated from somewhere else where someone was clearly grinding the underside of their car over some rocks in their desperation to park and see the bear.

The one bright spot was that nothing seemed capable of scaring this bear away from his stinky carcass, so we watched until we decided to go for our own breakfast. Of course when we drove back this way at the end of the morning the circus was still in town. Even the Kruger doesn’t see anything like this. And we’re here out of season!

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2012 at 7:12 pm and is filed under USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.