Recent Visit to ATC HQ...

Readers, you may be wondering if I ever took that camping trip I was mincing around about earlier this summer. You know, the one I was talking myself out of on account of all the unsettling bear-related anxiety? Yeah, I bailed on that idea, as you may have already suspected.

So I've been reflecting a lot about bears and camping out lately. In fact, just this week I was up visiting the Appalachian Trail Conservancy's headquarters at Harper's Ferry in West Virginia. My conclusion? After a fascinating visit (that concluded with my official membership in the ATC, as well as a spiffy t-shirt purchase) I've come around to really REALLY wanting to do a South-to-North thru-hike of the trail someday. I've been flirting with the idea of doing small section hikes for years now, but the idea of spending a 6 month period backpacking the entire thing is now holding sway (my current progress through Earl Shaffer's excellent Walking With Spring is cementing this rather romantic idea). And you know what? Talking with people who have actually followed through with this crazy undertaking makes it seem totally doable.

So I picked up the above-pictured brochure during my visit, and a quick look inside gleaned a lot of straightforward, no-BS advice regarding a thru-hike. As you might expect in such an official source, several pages worth of practical safety advice was included...and this is where bears re-enter the discussion. According to page 21:

"In recent years there have been reports of bears on the A.T. ripping open tents and even grabbing a sleeping bag or bivy sack and attempting to drag it off with a hiker inside. A bear that enters a campsite or cooking area should be considered predatory. Yelling, making loud noises, throwing rocks, etc., may frighten it away, however, you should be prepared to fight back if necessary. If you are actually attacked by a bear, you should fight for all you are worth and with anything at hand--rocks, sticks, fists."

(!) *eep* Bears actively seeking out non-menacing, unconscious people in their sleeping bags (i.e. hiker burritos) and dragging them off to their woodland lairs for a midnight snack?? Does this mean that the old "playing dead" shtick is debunked? Now we're being advised to go fist-to-giant-claws-and-teeth with a 400 pound snarly beast? Hmm! So there's something to think about, eh, campers?

Summertime in Bear Country

There is a list of known fatal bear attacks on Wikipedia. It lists the victim's name, age and gender along with the location (looks like Sarah Palin isn't the only thing that will keep me out of Alaska), and various points of interest about each incident. The list goes all the way back to poor William Waddell in October of 1875, killed by a brown bear at his lumber mill in Santa Cruz County, California.

After a week of rereading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods (highly recommended, by the way), I really should not have looked at this. You may have noticed from my sporadic postings of Bryson quotes that he describes some alarming facts and observations regarding this subject in his book. My bear preoccupation has already reached a boiling point; I've focused on the worst case scenario of being outdoors (um, nothing tops "eaten alive" does it?) in that unhealthy way that makes the relatively rare occurance of a bear attacking a human seem downright inevitable.

One of my favorite things to do is go camping, and obsessing about bear attacks is not exactly going to give me the kind of confidence (or brazen naivete) it takes to sleep through the night in the woods. In the interest of outdoor fun, I'm putting my bear-related research in hibernation mode for the summer, so no more pithy bear quotes until winter, dear readers--I have to preserve the tattered remnants of my poor frail moxie.

Top of the Food Chain...

Saw a book on wilderness survival today at work. It was one of those hardcore expedition type guides that assume the reader is going "off the grid" to live in the far reaches of some Thoreau-inspired backcountry. I get a little excited when I read these kinds of things, imagining myself hiking along the Appalachian Trail, communing with nature and experiencing life in its most elemental form. Rediculously romantic and naive, I know--it's just the thing that every sensitive, doe-eyed philosophy major beard-o who cites either Walden or On the Road as their favorite novel pines after.

I have been camping many many times. None of these outings would be anything like what that wilderness guide or Thoreau had in mind. I like to go out into the woods of the lovely and serene Daniel Boone National Forest with my folding chair and cooler full of beverages and listen to agreeable music on my portable stereo while staring at a fire. Maybe some hiking, a little light rock climbing, I even spelunked there once (bar none: one of the most terrifying experiences of my life). While the area does offer some "extreme" options (rock climbing, kayaking, rappeling), it ain't Alaska.

There are virtually no threatening wildlife (save for an occassional copperhead, though I've never seen one in 15 years of dumbly tramping about the bushes and underbrush), and the locals are pretty tame and friendly (it's actually a little touristy along the main roads--I guess the residents would rather sell me firewood than murder me in my tent at night). I enjoy getting out there and away from the city, I even NEED it from time to time or else I get rather grouchy.

I sometimes fantasize about going somewhere a little more remote, somewhere you'd read about in one of those adventure magazines, but there are two major issues that strike very real fear into my heart: 1. murderous hillbillies, 2. bears. That's it. Not scared of insects, poinson ivy, falling off cliffs, breaking an ankle in the middle of nowhere, pooping in the woods, hypothermia...just other people and bears. But those are the Big Two, aren't they? We are human F-ing beings: top of the food chain, the dominant life forms--If we are going to get killed off, it will most likely be by the destructive forces of other human beings and the terrifying creatures that still manage to roam around outside of zoos. To leave behind the relative comforts of home--piece of mind, safety, security, convenience--is to strip away quite a lot of that buffer zone between our trivial concerns (jobs, cars, computers, etc) and certain death. I guess thats part of what is attractive; I can tell you from personal experience that your life gets put into perspective post haste when you are laying prone in a tent in the middle of nowhere in the deep dark woods, sure that you just heard twigs snapping...