So, a couple of summers ago, my Mom and Dad and my 4 year old son and myself went on my sons first camping trip. It was to be a road trip following the Magruder Trail across the panhandle of Idaho east out of Elk city across to Darby Montana. Around 100 miles of dirt road between two of the largest national forests in the lower 48. We were planning on three days and camping out two nights. I took my camera along and was hoping to get some great shots of the wildlife and scenery.
After a long day of driving from Spokane, we started up into the mountains. In the late afternoon, we came around a bend in the road and saw a bear run up the bank. I said bear and grabbed my camera. Remember, this is 30 miles back in the national forest area and I figured that that bear would be long gone by the time we got up to the place I had seen him in the road. Lo and behold, When we got up there he was just about 20 fett up the bank and posing like a park bear. I thought "Wow, he doesn't look very afraid of people." Little did I realize. Anyway, I took a couple of still pics then grabbed the video camera and got just 5-10 seconds of video of him running back across the road and down the bank. He was FAST.
So we all thought that was pretty cool. My son got to see his first bear in the wild and we continued down the road. We planned to camp at a place just down the road called Poets creek camp and we arrived after less than a mile. It did cross my mind that the bear sighting was pretty close to where we were going to sleep out in tents for the night. Nonetheless, we found a spot along with 2 other groups and spent about an hour setting up our camp for the night. About the time we were done, one of the other campers came up and introduced himself and told us that the night before they had a bear in their camp and that he had fired off a couple rounds to frighten it away. he said that he had noticed that we had a small kid along and that we should keep a close eye on him and not let him wander off too far. We said we would be careful and after he left we had a quick discussion about whether or not we should stay. We decided we would gut it out and my Dad and I could stay up in shifts if we encountered any problems. We had a firearm along as well, but It was a little .38 revolver and I did not have much faith in it as anything other than a noise maker, mostly because I don't have much experience with pistols.
We sat down at the picnic table at about 6 to eat dinner and guess who shows up? You guessed it a bear. I looked over at my Mom and kinda looked past her shoulder and behind her and not 15' away was a bear. It looked to me like a different bear than the one that we had seen previously, smaller I guess, but almost fearless of people. I was kind of non-chalant and said "there's a bear right there". My mom grabbed my son who was on that side of the table and they were in the truck in about 20 seconds flat. My Dad and I had to throw rocks and approach the baer in order to get it to leave and it never did run it just walk off into the brush with a look over it's shoulder that seemed to say "You win now, but wait till it gets dark".
Well, my Mom said that if we we're going to stay in that campground she and Ben, my son, were sleeping in the truck. So, we packed everything up and left the campground. As we were leaving we saw a sign posted at the campground entrance that was rather ominous. We were glad we decided to leave. As we got about 1/2 mile past the campgroud turn off we came around the corner and saw another bear. I got some cool video of this one as well. We drove for about another 2 hours and my Mom and Son ended up sleeping in the truck while my Dad and I slept out on the ground rolled up in a tarp and our sleeping bags. It was a very memorable trip. My Son and I will enjoy this story for the rest of our lives. I will attach some stills. I don't know how to post video yet.
