What did you do when the bear charged you?
That’s beautiful territory but would be freaky out there alone and a bear tracking you for 6 miles.
That time I was not alone. I was supervising a forest monitoring team. An adult bear topped a ridge about 50 or so yards away from us at full speed. (If you don’t know, full speed for a bear is just about racehorse speed.) It was headed straight for one of my workers. I immediately ran toward it and picked up a limb on the way. (I was thinking, “What am I going to tell this worker’s parents?”) The bear came within about 15 feet of the worker and abruptly pulled up and stopped, and I showed up a second later. We had formed a triangle—the bear, me, and my worker—the triangle being perhaps 15 feet on a side. We didn’t move. The bear stood there for a minute or two sniffing the air. After a couple of minutes, it simply turned and walked away. I think that it didn’t realize at first that my worker was a human until it got almost on top of him. Bears’ have a fantastic sense of smell but very poor eyesight. I think that it thought at first that my worker was a different creature that would make an easy meal. It wasn’t until it was almost on top of him that it thought differently. Our hearts beat quickly for a bit. I still remember it clearly, although it has been more than 25 years ago.
I was at Shenandoah National Park when I had the encounters. The bear that followed me for six miles was in the remote, southern section of the Park. I had someone drop me off on Skyline Drive and I walked downhill to the boundary. For much of that distance, you could scarcely see 50 feet because of Rhododendron tangles or blackberry thickets. The spookiest part was when the vegetation was extremely thick, and the bear was little more than 25 feet away, and I still couldn’t see it.