The Hike that Got a Little More Adventurous Than I Had Imagined

The leaves were amazing, and I went into this weekend with a goal to go on at least one short hike each day, since I was home alone with all the kidlets.  YaYa despises hikes, so I didn’t try to wrangle her to come along.  On Friday I took the three youngest kidlets on a wonderful walk through the woods with the promise that they could play in creek.  We had a terrific time, and I’ll write more about that soon.

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon.  This time both YaYa and Mr. SP groaned and moaned about coming along on a hike, and since they were playing so nicely together with Legos, I decided to try leaving them home together and seeing what happened.  They promised not to fight.  (Of course, I later found out that they broke the promise, so that won’t be happening again any time soon).  The Banana was excited to be in charge of my really old camera and take pictures of her own on this hike, and Mr. TOF is always happy to go on an adventure.

We had a great time tromping through the forest, taking pictures as we went, searching for our favorite trees with colorful leaves and picking up fallen leaves and acorns off the ground.  We were singing and laughing and talking and making a lot of noise as we zipped along.  Eventually, probably about a half mile into the forest, the trail headed up toward the backyards of some houses, and when we could clearly see the buildings, we decided to turn around and head back to a different trail in the same area because the scenery was so beautiful and afternoon was young.

We turned around and walked about 20 steps and I looked ahead on the trail and saw two black bears.  They were not far away.

Oh great.

Now, you need to know that we do occasionally see black bears in town, here, and it makes perfect sense that they would be ambling along in a forest if they are out and about.  In fact, sometimes at migrating times of the year, we see them in people’s yards.  I once stopped my car so a bear could cross the busiest street in my neighborhood, right in front of me.  I’ve been on a walk and seen bears cross the road from one patch of woods to the next far, far off in front of me.  There are videos of bears playing on the swingset of our neighbors up the hill, and another video of bears on the porch of friends halfway down our street.  Bears happen here.  If they are in your neighborhood, you just go inside.  It is rare to come across them in the forest, because they avoid people in their natural habitat, so if you are making a lot of noise, they will head away from you when they hear you walking.

I never worry about hiking in the forest with my kidlets because we are ALWAYS making tons of noise.  Ridiculous amounts of noise.

So, I was surprised to see these bears, but not too worried.  I told The Banana to stay calm, that there were bears on the trail, and we were just going to turn around and walk the other direction, because they were close, but I was pretty sure they were not upset and we could just walk away.  We turned around and headed back the other direction.  The Banana was walking pretty quickly and I had Mr. TOF, and pretty soon The Banana wails because she sees ANOTHER bear in front of us that direction.  Sure enough.  All the bears were big, ready for winter, but this bear was even bigger, a Mama bear.

Good grief.  There we were, in the MIDDLE of a Mama bear and two baby bears (that didn’t really look like babies anymore).  I’m no bear expert, but I was pretty sure that this was not a place I wanted to be.  The bears were getting more curious, checking us out, standing on their hind legs and looking at us and then at each other.  I backed into the forest a bit and tried to calm my terrified kidlets, who were probably the most scared I’d ever seen them.  I decided that we would try to head straight up the hill through the forest where there was no trail toward a house we could see through the trees, giving thanks that at least we weren’t in the very middle of the forest.  I had visions of being mauled by a bear.  I thought it was ridiculous that the first time I leave YaYa and Mr. SP alone together I meet bears in the forest.   We walked as quickly and as calmly as we could away, and thankfully the bears just watched us go.

We came up into the backyard of a house and walked past their garage.  I was trying to figure out what street I was on since I had no idea where we were at that point.  The owners of the house came out and I apologized for tresspassing and explained that we had just seen bears in the forest.  A few minutes before they had seen the bears walk through their backyard, and at first they thought we had gone into the forest to photograph the bears, but then I explained that we were hiking and were trapped between the bears.  When she understood what had happened, the kind lady offered to give us a ride back to our car, because I really wasn’t going back into the forest, and when I realized where we were, it would have been a three mile walk to go around the forest to get back to our car, which would have been fine for me, but a long way for little three year old feet.

It all turned out fine in the end, and when I called Dr. Peds to tell him about our adventure he mentioned that it was probably a good thing that Grandma Jan was not around to hear this story.  She was convinced I’d be eaten by bears when I moved to Northern Minnesota.

This will just be one of those epic family stories.  The Banana stated that she would definitely have a great tale to spin at show and tell on Monday, and Mr. TOF has been talking nonstop about the bears that almost ate him.  Thankfully both of them are not too traumatized.