Closer to Thee, Brown Bear

Unlike Seattle's University District, the town of Whistler is a bit more used to living with, and near, bears. Over the past holiday weekend, we discovered just how close one can get, as the record-breaking snowfall from this past winter at Whistler means the bears coming out of hibernation this spring can't get very far up the mountain just yet.

We're pretty used to seeing the occasional bear on the golf course, or even lurking nearby a trail in the bike park. Maybe once or twice a season--but over the course of three days we got to know two bears very well. The bike park had 5 resident bears while we were there: a mom with two cubs (we never actually saw them ourselves), a juvenile black bear (about 2 years old) and a young brown bear (didn't find out its age). What you're seeing above is a biker about 5 feet from the brown bear.

Even the young bears are surprisingly non-chalant--here you can see him looking up after the biker goes whizzing by:

And this is an overhead view of the black one right under the chairlift:

It was understandably exciting to be able to be so close to these animals and not fear for our lives--they are magnificent and terrifying this close. Many times over the weekend, we thought back to the way Timothy Treadwell talks to them in Grizzly Man and had a good chuckle: "No! Bad bear, you back away, STAY BACK!....But I love you, I loooooove you!"

However, their complacency in the presence of humans is in reality a bad sign. The more bears habituate to people, and wander into human food sources, the more likely something bad will happen. To the people, and then inevitably, to the bears.

(Confidential to the nineteen year-olds who stayed up all night partying in the condo near ours and then just left all your garbage outside on the sidewalk instead of carting it into the secured garage garbage area: you suck, we wish you would get eaten by the bear you will no doubt attract, but then someone would have to go shoot it and then you would suck even more.)