I think it safe to say that, in fifteen plus years of hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, more bears have seen me than I have seen bears. The bears I’ve encountered lurk in the imagination, like the hip, existentialist jazz saxophone blowing Bear from Rafi Zabor’s “The Bear”

“Something came through for a couple of choruses and floated above the demands of the time and turned slowly on its axis, but then, even before the Bear was aware of it, he had lowered his saxophone and begun to walk offstage. His solo, apparently, was over.”

Or the extraordinary true tale of Wojtek, the bear who served alongside a Polish Artillery unit during WWII, related in “Bear Season” (Bernie Hafeli)

“A lorry driver, a German prisoner-of-war, was so shocked to see the bear out for a stroll that he drove his vehicle off the road, into a pond, and couldn’t get it restarted. When Wojtek went to investigate, the horrified driver took off running. Wojtek lumbered along in curious pursuit until the driver scrambled up a tree. The bear had never treed a human being before; what new game was this? For a minute he watched the man, utterly intrigued, then decided to climb up after him. This evoked a series of blood-curdling screams; the German was certain his time had come. Alerted by the screams of imminent death, Piotr, my uncle, and some others ran to the rescue, coaxing Wojtek down with a bottle of beer.”

And of course there is the grizzly specimen that adorns the California flag, the Ursus arctos californicus “Monarch”.

A useful and detailed guide to the Old Mt Wilson trail from Sierra Madre.

 

Walking Project 004_ROAR from chris worland on Vimeo.