"Scary Bear" Story

The summer is almost over. At Livengood, the drill camp where I’ll spend my last few days in Alaska, the leaves are turning yellow and the mornings are a little frosty. I fly home to Denver on Monday evening. 5 work days left.

So … I finally have a “scary bear” story. Not that I ever saw it. Sometimes what you don’t see is more scary! Last Friday Dan and I started work on a soil sample survey about 40 minutes out of Fairbanks. Dan lives in Fairbanks and commuted everyday. I stayed at the Fairbanks Creek Lodge closer to the area. This used to be an old bunkhouse for a mining camp – built around 1928. The family that owns it moved it in 3 pieces about 12 years ago. The lodge sleeps 19 in addition to the family so it is a fairly large building. I spent an interesting evening with Brenda and Steve and a Swedish couple looking at the photos of the lodge-move. Anyway – good food and nice people. Back to the “scary bear.” The soil sampling we were doing was a fair distance from the lodge – about 30 minutes in the truck and then another 45 minutes on ATV’s. That was also an interesting experience as I’ve never even sat on an ATV before last week. Fortunately Dan was a good ATV instructor and wee didn’t lose too much time. Despite the frosty mornings and biting wind I survived and can now put “ATV experience” on my resume!

Dan and I took the first sample together (it took another 30 minutes to get to this point after we left the ATVs! Some commute!) to see what we were sampling and make sure we were on the same page. We then moved to our respective lines which were about 50 meters apart. While digging my first hole I smelt something really bad. Bad enough to make me stand up and look around for a dead carcass. Nothing. I moved on to my next sample site – 50m away and started digging. There was a shriek followed by Dan yelling down the hill “What’s up?” I got on my radio and replied “That wasn’t me?” Dan says “It wasn’t?” So we carry on to our next sample site, still 50 meters apart and as I start digging I hear this really deep, loud growl! Very close. As I fumbled with the radio to ask Dan If he had heard it (silly question, it was a very loud growl!) I was trying to get my gun out of the pack (!!). About the same time I radioed Dan there was another louder growl – loud enough to echo in the valley. It was pretty close and Dan confirmed it was 100% bear growl. Where’s a chopper when you need it? We made loud noises and fortunately we never heard it again. We hoped it got fed up with us and our noise and left the valley. We think that the original shriek was either a cub or the bear killing a small animal. The growls could have been for us or the bear telling its cub to get a move on. We’ll never know. Digging the rest of the holes that day was a little nerve wracking; your senses are all on super alert. The guy that invented Teddy Bears for children had a warped sense of humor or he never heard an angry bear growl!

Not too big of a deal, but a reminder that when we are out working we are intruders in nature!

Not much else from the new part of the world … will try to take Fall color photos tomorrow.