I Don’t Believe in Bears
One of the many bear warnings in Yosemite National Park.
I don’t believe bears exist.*
I spent this week camping out in Bear Country. That’s Bear Country with a capital B and C. In other words, Yellowstone National Park and Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming.
Everywhere I looked, everywhere I turned, there were signs, brochures, plaques, and warnings about bears. EVERYWHERE! No piece of park-sponsored literature was free of cautions about bear presence, bear behavior, bear attacks, bear thievery (generally involving food), distances one should keep from bears, and bear-avoidance tactics.
Clearly, bears were a thing here. They were a popular symbol too. Most gift shop paraphernalia included their likenesses: souvenir t-shirts, mugs, magnets, stickers, hats - all emblazoned with images of the eternal bear.
The tightest strictures were placed upon camping out in Bear Country. Not only did all of your food and food-related items, like cookware and trash, need to be secreted in a bear-proof metal box or inside your car, every item that had the remotest whiff of scent - toiletries, toothpaste, wet wipes, regular bottled water, empty water bottles, even the water that you brushed your teeth with - had to be carefully disposed of so as not to attract the bears. At some campsites you had to sign a waiver acknowledging that you’d heard the rules and agreed to the conditions.
Every trail map warned about bears, and what to do if you should encounter one. Every shop in the parks sold or rented bear spray to visitors. The parks emphasized, over and over, that they were not responsible for your injury or death by bear, should you choose to take your life in your hands by venturing out into the wilderness. (I.e., hike one of the park’s curated trails.)
Bears, bears, everywhere!
Well, one couldn’t be blamed for assuming, after all of this talk about bears and all of the extreme caution you had to take around them, that one might actually see a bear during one’s visit to the park.
But one would be wrong.
One did not, in fact, see the slightest hint of a bear throughout one’s entire week in the parks.
And one was very disappointed.
After all, I had also recently visited Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, also reputed to be part of Bear Country, where I’d also had to lock up all my scented items in metal boxes and be on the alert for bear activity wherever I went, according to the brochures. And I hadn’t seen any bears there either.
At Yellowstone, surely, I told myself, I would of course see a bear. They’re everywhere! I mean, just going by the literature, the sheer volume of words and papers and signs related to bears, there had to be many, many, many bears gamboling around the place. To have to be so careful, at every turn, of preventing bears from getting your food must mean that there was actually a good chance of a bear getting your food. Honestly, it seemed as though you’d just be tripping over bears everywhere you went!
Or so I thought.
But as the days went on, as I continued to not see any bears anywhere in the parks, I became skeptical. I didn’t see any bears, I didn’t hear any bears, I didn’t notice any signs of bears around my campsites. I visited Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, purported to virtually teem with all sorts of wildlife. I saw plenty of buffalo there, and some antelope, but you guessed it - no bears. And when I hiked? No bears.
In fact, chillingly, a park ranger himself confirmed to me that bears were not, in fact, running rampant over park campgrounds, as the massive body of rules and regulations around bears would have me believe. When registering for a site at the Gros Ventres Campground in Grand Tetons National Park, I was read the rules about food disposal and asked to initial my understanding. As I did so, I asked the ranger helping me, out of curiosity, the last time a bear had been seen in the campground.
“Oh, not for a while now,” he responded cheerfully. “Probably, oh, what do you think, about a month?”
A fellow ranger confirmed this. One bear, a month ago.
In fact, the first ranger told me, he had been working at this campground for over 20 years and he had never seen a bear there.
Though I feigned surprise, it was no more than what I had suspected for some time. Bears were not hiding behind trees for campers to go to sleep so they could ransack campsites for charred hot dog bits or toothpaste water.
I became more careless about avoidance strategies. I didn’t bother collecting my teeth-brushing backwash to pour down the drains. I started keeping a bottle of water in my tent overnight. I certainly didn’t buy or rent any bear spray. And when I hiked, most of the time I didn’t even bother talking or singing loudly to warn any potential bears in the area that I was around.
Because I knew I wouldn’t encounter any bears. I just knew I wouldn’t, because it was all a giant scam.**
I’m not saying bears don’t exist in an absolute sense. I’m not a moron. I have seen bears with my own eyes. In zoos, for example. And I even saw a bear cub in the wild on the very first day of my trip! I know they are real. Technically.
And yet, at the same time, not to see a bear in places supposedly stuffed with bears seemed to put them in the same mythical category as Santa Claus and Bigfoot. Everyone talked about them, everyone claimed to have seen them, but no one ever really had.***
I knew I wasn’t in danger. I knew that no bear would approach me or my food. Because they weren’t there. It is a lie, perpetuated by the national park system, to keep visitors frightened and to support the fraudulent bear spray industry.****
That’s right. The time has come to tear the lid off one of the biggest rackets perpetrated on good Americans the nation over: the bear scare myth.
Every day, national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Tetons sell or rent hundreds or thousands^ of cans of bear spray to innocent, naive park-goers who have been trained by park authorities to fear bears at all times and in all places.
Of those thousands of cans of bear spray sold and rented yearly, do you know what percentage are actually discharged - not accidentally, in the user’s face or the faces of the user’s friends and family - but at threatening bears in close proximity?
I wish I could tell you. But the powerful bear spray lobby refuses to release these important figures.^^
There is only one obvious conclusion here: bears are not a danger to humans, and park rangers are liars.^^^
Maybe that’s overstating it a bit. The truth is, like shark attacks, bear-on-human violence is one of those incredibly rare and unlikely events that everyone is terrified of despite the actual chances of it happening being nearly zero. There’s an average of about 2 bear-inflicted fatalities in North America per year. That’s the US AND Canada.
The parks encourage people to carry bear spray^^^^ just in case they should encounter a bear, because obviously, an uptick in bear-related deaths is a shitty statistical shift for any national park. And people are irrational and scared of everything, so they probably feel “safer” carrying bear spray, even though if they actually encountered a bear they’d most likely just gibber, or spray themselves in the face because they’re so dumb. That, or be too busy taking pictures for Instagram to think about self-defense. And anyone killed in that case would be a clear victim of Darwinian principles, and our gene pool is better off without them.*^
The bottom line: In case you couldn’t tell, I’m super bummed that I didn’t see any bears.
_____________________________
*They definitely do.
**It’s definitely not.
***There have been many verified bear sightings in national parks.
****This is blatantly untrue.
^Unverified.
^^Nope.
^^^Bears are extremely dangerous and powerful animals, and you should always obey any and all park authority guidelines for avoiding or encountering them. Also, park rangers are not liars. (Statistically, some of them may be, but you should still listen to them re:bears.)
^^^^Bear spray is actually banned in several US parks, including Yosemite.
*^This is a joke.