Lake on the map under the Plexiglas countertop and explained that the trails were under several feet of snow, concluding with “If you don’t have snowshoes, you’ll be post-holing up to your waist.” I didn’t know what post- holing was, but I filled out the permit and kept quiet.
In the early afternoon, I set off hiking with my pack loaded for a three-day solo trip-my first overnight trip alone. I had my camping gear and clothing in my main pack, and my food and cooking supplies in a small purple school pack that I wore on my chest. About a mile in from the Taggert Lake Trailhead, the snowpack was already deep enough that I wallowed with every footstep. Without other bootprints around, I was obviously the first hiker to access this trail in a while, perhaps all winter. I struggled under my heavy pack. Deeper and deeper the snow became as I gained in elevation and moved up onto the rounded moraines left behind from the ice age glaciers. After an hour of slow-moving progress, I was approaching the forest at the crest of the moraine and a significant snowdrift. As my boots sank down several feet with every stride, the jagged ice crystals of the middle snowpack increasingly abraded my shins. In another fifteen minutes, with snow packed in my boots and up my pants legs, I lost sensation below my knees, and the cold wet abuse became less bothersome. After dropping into the snow several dozen times, I changed strategy and crawled up the last twenty feet to the spine of the snowdrift and plopped myself astride the compacted lip of snow. Breathing heavily from the exhausting effort, I looked back over my left shoulder at the series of deep holes I had left and understood then what post-holing meant.
I checked my map and saw that I had about a quarter-mile distance to cover before I reached the south side of Bradley Lake, and then about three quarters of a mile to hike around the lake to get to my campsite. I was at the edge of the forest, where the snow looked to be firmer. There was a short downhill on my right that I slid down on my backside. I stood up only to plunge in up to my waist when I took my first step. “Ohhh, this is going to be a long mile,” I said aloud, thinking snowshoes would indeed have been smart, even though I’d never used them.
It took over two hours of toil to reach a short footbridge on the north side of Bradley Lake, fighting my way through the waist-deep snow. Clouds hung above the treetops, and I could see only a few hundred vertical feet up the mountainside to the west, where the evergreens disappeared into the vapors.
A couple hundred yards past the bridge, I found a campsite sign-post mostly buried in the snow, twenty feet from the lakeshore. Relieved to have arrived before dark, after the unexpected four-hour slog, I set up my green two-person tent just beyond the sign, on a small patch of dirt and frozen pine needles. My feet ached with the cold. I sat in the doorway of my tent and unlaced my sodden hiking boots. A deluge of melted snow splashed from each boot when I removed them. I was sufficiently tired that I didn’t care that my socks dripped water in the tent as I peeled them off my pruned feet. Rubbing the pads of my waterlogged toes, I gave a start at a nearby sound, the breaking of a branch. I listened intently and heard splashes in the lake, coming from the other side of some thick bushes a dozen yards to my left. Maybe it would be another moose coming out at dusk, like I’d seen at Phelps Lake. Intrigued, I leaned forward to peek around the flap of my tent and watched a medium-sized black bear wade out from the foliage hanging a few feet offshore over the shallow lake. He looked to be about two hundred pounds, not over a few years old, and all black.
Hurrying, I grabbed my camera out of my backpack and took a picture. The flash reflected off the bushes, and I worried that it would scare the bear off before I could see him clearly through the brush. However, rather than being startled or running away, he coolly altered course, straight for my tent. One step, two steps, three steps; he was definitely heading for my tent. “Whoa, bear!” I meekly stammered. “Hey, hey, heyyy!” He kept coming, passed the bushes, stepped out of the water, and was closing the distance to my tent. I thought maybe I had been downwind and he hadn’t smelled me yet. I tried whistling to alert the lumbering beast of my presence, but I was too frightened to purse my lips properly and only managed to spray spittle onto my camera.
Now just twenty-five feet away, I knew this bear could see me and wasn’t coming to pay a social visit. He was looking scrawny and wanted my food for his first big post-hibernation dinner. I had dropped my little purple pack at the tent door and, looking at it there, straight in the sights of the bear, I realized what I had to do. I grabbed the food pack and, escaping the tent with the bear only fifteen feet away, dashed off to my right. My bare feet beat the hard ground as I scampered around the back of the tent and, leaping over a downed tree, landed directly in a snowbank where first my left foot, then my right, punctured the icy crust. Pain seared across my left foot, and when I extracted it from the snow, I saw that I’d cut my arch on a protruding branch of the fallen tree. A glance over my shoulder told me I had no time to spare for first aid. I bounded off into the snowy forest, abrading and numbing my feet as I went.
Scouting the nearby trees for possible food-hanging positions, I didn’t see anything that was at least eight feet off the ground, five feet from a trunk, and strong enough to catch my bag if I tossed it up on a branch. Normally, I would use some string and haul the bag over a high, sturdy limb, but I didn’t have time for that tactic now. I circled around clockwise and ended up in front of my tent, then off a few paces to the west. The bear followed my every move in the forest, and I never put more than thirty feet between us. I finally noticed a large tree that had toppled some years ago, leaving a tangle of thick roots jutting into the air. They weren’t high enough to be out of reach, but I could at least lash my bag to the roots by the straps and go put on my boots before coming back to find a better spot for the food. I rushed over to the upended tree, wrapped the straps around three gnarled roots protruding four feet in the air, and twisted the bag down behind another root so the bear couldn’t easily get to it. I then gingerly pranced back to the tent on my numbed feet.
Sitting in the tent doorway, I briefly checked the cuts on my left foot before cramming on my sopping-wet boots and lighting off to the downed tree once more. In the thirty seconds of my absence, the bear had taken my food bag in his teeth and, yanking it back and forth, shaken the straps off the roots. As I watched the bear easily snap the root to which I had tied the most securely attached strap, I understood I was in dire straits. I had dipped deeply into my energy supply to get to my campsite, and I needed nourishment before I could even attempt to retreat to my car. If the bear made off with that bag, I would be stranded. The bear was already twenty feet along the length of the tree’s horizontal trunk, with the purple pack in his jaws, when I came to the conclusion that, with my life possibly at stake, I had to get that bag back-by whatever means necessary. I broke off a yardstick’s length of tree root, held it like a club in my left hand, hopped up on the trunk of the fallen tree, and waved my weapon over my head, roaring at the top of my lungs, “Give me my food back, bear!” I’m not sure what response I was expecting, but my body trembled with fear when the bear stopped, turned his head back over his right shoulder, then spun on his hind feet to face me at ten paces. I’d gotten his attention, all right, and now we had ourselves a showdown.
I snarled and shouted, waved my stick in the air, and yelled again, even louder, “Give me back my FOOD!” Like a dog questioning his master’s order, the bear tilted his head quizzically to the left, and I thought I could see his forehead wrinkle. At his pause, I gathered my courage and began stomping on the log. Shouting anew, I took a pounding step toward the motionless bear, then another, and a third, commanding, “You picked the wrong hungry hiker to steal his food-DROP IT!” At the last word, I jumped up and slammed both my boots down on the tree trunk. The bear dropped the food bag, lumbered off the side of the log, and started off into the forest. I could hardly believe it. I yelled after him, “Shoo, bear!” and went over to my purple backpack. Before I picked it up, I threw my broken root after the bear; it crashed into some pine branches over his head, and he scampered off to the west.
Five minutes later, I had my camping stove heating a pot of lake water. I anxiously waited for it to boil, imagining that the bear would return any minute. Two minutes after the water finally boiled, I’d set a personal record for the fastest-ever consumption of a bowl of ramen-noodle soup. I inspected the little rucksack while I packed my food, bowl, and stove into it, and saw four distinct holes from the bear’s teeth. By the time I had hoisted the pack into a safe location, night had fallen, and I cowered back at my tent, the bear winning some revenge via my psychological taxation. With the darkness blinding me, I lay in my sleeping bag, fear provoking paranoia every time the faintest forest sound reached my ears. For seven hours, whenever a leaf fell to the snow, a pine needle dropped into the lake, or a tree creaked in the breeze, my imagination launched like a screaming dragster, accelerating from zero to death-by-bear-mauling in a split second. Splash, a fish jumped in the lake, and instantly my mind responded, “OhmyGodthebearisbackhe’sgonnaeatmeI’mgonna die!” as I held what I was certain would be my last breath. The terror didn’t ease until well after three in the morning, when I finally caught some uneasy shut-eye.
After starting late the next morning, I managed to wade through the hip-deep snow up Garnet Canyon to an elevation around 10,500 feet. The ever present rain clouds obliterated the landscape. I knew I was in the cirque where I had to make a critical route-finding decision, and I couldn’t see a single landmark. It was too late in the day to find my way by trial and error, so I went down in the trench I’d excavated on my ascent. Two hours later, I
