“How Team Hagen Saved an Unsuspecting Photographer from a Ravenous Grizzly.”

Mid afternoon we stopped at Bow Lake.  Jenny met a pair of German tourists and a local and we exchanged cameras.  We don’t have a selfie stick, we’ve got Jen.  It’s a little awkward for me sometimes  but she actually TALKS to other humans on our travels.  What a novel idea. So while I’m busy taking pictures of mountains and rivers and chronicling wildlife encounters with creatures that never bother to ask what I do for a living, she Swiffers her way through the social landscape picking up stories and scrap booking them in her own Jennyriffic way.  

Anyway, on the walk back to the car we came across a big pile of bear poo that I know wasn’t on the trail we’d walked on just thirty minutes before.  Conclusion:  There’s a bear VERY close by.  I’m definitely not trying to freak Jenny out but she’s skeptical.  “How do you know it’s bear poo? How do you know the difference?  What if you’re wrong . . .”  For two thousand miles I’d been trying to convince her that we’re unlikely to even see a bear from the road much less close up.  Now I’m trying to convince her that one is probably right around the corner.  Just then a couple walking by  overheard us talking and confirmed that there is indeed a GRIZZLY about twenty feet off the road down by the last two cars.  Where do you think our cars is?  Yep, that’d be our trusty Subaru waaaay back in nosebleed parking.  Great.  We see a park employee with a bucket and shovel heading for the poo mound and I make some smart remark like, “Clean up on aisle three,” but Jennifer’s not appreciating my humor anymore for some reason.

We slowly walked toward the car and sure enough the grizzly is right where the couple said -  maybe twenty or thirty feet from our car.  Jen quietly climbed in through the driver’s side and slid across.  I hopped in and did a u-turn to the other side of the road to get a better vantage point. How often do you get to shoot a grizzly?  After all, we don’t have fancy cameras with zoom lenses.

I was just thinking to myself about how lucky we were seeing the bear when we noticed the photographer.  In our tunnel vision we’d overlooked her.  She was on the side of the road squatting down to photograph wild flowers completely oblivious to the grizzly grazing just over her shoulder behind a small hill.  Jenny peaked her head out and called the woman over.  Looking slightly annoyed she walked toward us and Jen told her about the bear.  We’ve now got our car positioned between her and the bear as she looks over and it registers on her face how close she came to a close encounter of the pants filling kind.  I referred to that as a PFE:  pants filling experience. We had a few of those on the trip.  More installments to come.