If someone threatened to "open up a can of bears on" me, I would definitely leave. That sounds dangerous.
This post sort of has the feel of a bat-signal (bear-signal?) for me, but I don't have anything in particular to say about it.
You could go to UC Davis and get some bear spray. I'm sure they didn't use it all.
3: I suspect you're the secondary target after CCarp. A shaded relief topo of Glacier was among my $1 per map haul from the USGS during their recent sale.
5: Maybe, but I believe neb is talking about Glacier Peak Wilderness Area in Washington State, not Glacier National Park.
Yes, that's why I referred to the Glacier Peak Wilderness, rather than to Glacier National Park.
Is there a functioning glacier in the not-park?
From the link in 6:
Glacier Peak's highest summit is at 10,541 feet, with tattered ridges and summits draped with active glaciers.
I'm guessing that, due to global warming, the glacier's half-empty.
6, 7: Ah, right, embarrassing I've apparently read myself out today.
I have backpacked right near the northern edge of that, but not sure if we crossed into the wilderness itself or not. I do not recall worrying much about grizzlies, but that could have been merely ignorance and stupidity. Some daunting terrain, however.
9: That's good as I hate inaccurately named wilderness areas. Ever since I learned that the Smokey Mountains were just covered in clouds, I've tried to get the renamed.
I should probably clarify that I don't actually think this post was intended as a bat-signal to me or anyone else. The subject matter just hit interestingly close to home for me.
Some friends of mine just stayed with me on the way to and from a backpacking trip in Glacier. On the way back, they reported having seen no bears but several moose. Then they reported that they actually were behind a moose on a trail for an hour, following it. It (he? dunno) repeatedly looked back at them. I did not feel that they were sufficiently nervous about all this, but since they survived, I guess it worked out okay.
I'd rather see a black bear than a moose, I think. Grizzly, not so much.
(Glacier National Park, I meant in 14. In Montana.)
I'd rather see a black bear than a moose
If I could, I surely would
I didn't intend it as a bat-signal or anything, though it did occur to me that you might have the reaction you're having.
I found it somewhat interesting that the forest service person I spoke to didn't seem to be aware that some wilderness areas (including the wilderness area directly to her north) actually have policies about whether you can hang food or are required to use canisters. Likewise the guy at the ranger station to whom I first posed the question, whose response was "we don't know, ask the forest service.".
Reading this post, I had the following thoughts: "Wait, Glacier is full of grizzlies. Wait, Glacier is a National Park. Huh? Glacier... Peak Wilderness? ... Oh." It was a very slow process.
17,2: It's the Action Park of wilderness areas.
I found it somewhat interesting that the forest service person I spoke to didn't seem to be aware that some wilderness areas (including the wilderness area directly to her north) actually have policies about whether you can hang food or are required to use canisters. Likewise the guy at the ranger station to whom I first posed the question, whose response was "we don't know, ask the forest service.".
That is interesting. I don't know about the Forest Service, but in the NPS each unit typically sets its own policies for stuff like this and they don't necessarily keep close tabs on what other units do. Sounds like the situation may be similar in the FS.
"Fish and Wildlife sometimes sends problem bears to our land."
I like to imagine that these are the bears that hang out under the bleachers and smoke up.
the bears that hang out under the bleachers and smoke up
All walkin droopy, with their hair in their eyes and their pants too low.
23: heeeey booboo, you don't fuckin got any bennies or anything do ya?
A bit of research reveals that there are indeed very few grizzlies in the North Cascades area. A grizzly bear has been photographed in the North Cascades National Park for the first time in more than four decades, confirming estimates of a small population of "ursus horribilis" in mountains of northern Washington.I saw estimates of 5-10 or 15-30.
But most everything in the Cascades north of I-90 seems to be in The North Cascades Grizzly Bear Recovery Area.
One of my kids is wandering around that area at the moment (but not backpacking). A couple of decent day hikes along US Rt. 2 are Wallace Falls and Barclay Lake, and Mt. Index along that road is the best mountain in the US under 6,000 feet (and Index itself had a decent little restaurant, at least in the '90s). But I assume you are up along the North Cacades Highway.
Saw a couple of big damn grizzlies in Glacier today. A smaller sow, which we didn't see, was around us for a bit, crossi g the tral ahead, and then behind, and then wlking along the trail ahead of us. Saw a couple moose too: one just outside the park, near Babb.
it seems to me that you'd want a cannister where the trees (or bars) aren't high enough. Or where the black bears have become so habituated they are untying knots etc.
I saw a moose yesterday. My boss hosted a barbecue and I got lost on the way over. I turned onto what turned out to be the wrong street in the subdivision and there was a female moose, browsing by the side of the road. I didn't see any calves nearby, which made me nervous since I didn't want to accidentally get between a mother and calf, so I turned around pretty quick.
it seems to me that you'd want a cannister where the trees (or bars) aren't high enough.
Yeah, the parks in Alaska mostly require them (and many provide them for free). That's in a context where it's mostly tundra with few trees and lots of grizzlies.
My dog had a moose encounter in Idaho over the weekend. She's formed a new respect for the animal.
See you were off tramping around a great place while we were here saving America with incisive blog commentary on the Supremes? Sheesh.
and also that they don't have many grizzlies, just black bears,
Well, grizzlies are fierce predators, obviously, but the potential dangers of (the supposedly 'harmless") black bear should not be underestimated. For example, a black bear might attempt to drag you out of an outhouse:
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/23/11836543-grabbed-from-the-throne-man-on-camping-trip-survives-outhouse-bear-attack?lite
In which case, you'd want yer buddy to come with a gun, eh? Danny, you coming to help me?!
Canadians have guns? I thought they responded to bear attacks by playing Tragically Hip songs until the bear gets bored and wanders away.
We've reached Glacial Peak Wilderness! From here on out, our glaciers will be producing an ever-diminishing amount of wilderness!
I would pay money to see neb go one to one with a bear. Black bear is fine, doesn't have to be a grizzly. I just want to see some philosopher v bear action and goddamn it I am willing to pay for it. Let's make this happen.
I would pay money to see neb go one to one with a bear
That thread has some good advice. To be clear, I'm not saying you have to fight the bear unarmed. In fact, you can take any nonfirearm weapon you want (except maybe a crossbow). Spear, atlatl, whatever. No tranq darts. Video is fine but if we can do this in some kind of forest clearing I will go in person.
Unrelatedly, did you know that Jean de Brunhoff's Babar and His Children (1937) contains the phrase "puts [his child] on his trunk and uses it like a cockhorse"? I found that out tonight.
Cannon is OK if it's pre-1900 and you carry and load it yourself. But I think it's a firearm, no?
I think a cannon technically counts as a firearm. On the other hand, I'm not sure the "no firearms" rule is really necessary. There's been a fair amount of debate about whether guns are actually any help against bears when wielded by people who are not already experienced at shooting bears.
That's for grizzlies, though. Black bears may be a different matter.
Oh, right, for some reason I was conflating "firearm" and what wikipedia seems to class as "small firearms", guns and rifles and such.
Hand grenade?
I'd rather have a bear in front of me than a bear lobotomize me.
I once fucked a couple of bears. Ohhh.. your talking about something else.
There are far better things we could talk neb into doing with a bear.
Clearly I'm not here for the hunting.
Pwned by mere seconds. Should've seen that coming.
I Fucked a Bear for the FBI and Found God,
Thinking about Satoyama recently, and why urban fucks love the wilderness, "leaving behind nothing but footprints", but despise cultured or cultural landscapes, considering them offenses against nature and hikers.
I actually watched Miyazaki struggle to preserve one of the last hectares in Tokyo not steel and concrete.
Sure they love nature. But only to visit. Something about the Enlightenment liberal being a variety of Puritan, wild passions only in their proper place, to be visited on weekends and vacations to refresh the intellect.
The "Begin Japanology" episode (jeez, these are relentlessly upbeat and positive, and too much about food) I saw on satoyama had an American expat living, studying, preserving and teaching in a satoyama east of Tokyo
Other American expats of multiple decades I've seen doing indigo dying and bonsai. Others.
I wouldn't live in Japan, or even visit.
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Harvey contra liberalism (in Cosmopolitanism), or how Democrats and Republicans reproduce each other in a dialectic
The blurring of the boundaries between anthropology and bistory achieved by the subaltern studies group in India might offer a friendlier terrain upon which to address these issues. Their insistence on seeking to reveal history from below, as it occurs in actual places through individual lives irrespective of class or culture, does indeed yield important insights. But while their handling of history shows a good deal of skill and depth, their treatment of spatiality and geography is peculiarly wooden. S. Deshpande, working in the contemporary version of this tradition, provides an instructive example. He investigates the relations betvveen globalization, conceptions of the Indian nation, and the construction of "Hindu-ness" (or "Hindutva") as a locus of distinctive identity and meaning across the Indian subcontinent. He sees the history of these relations as "closely and crucially intertwined with a geography," though it also has a class character. Nehru's secular developmental model depended, for example, upon a "privileged pan-Indian elite that could, by and large, afford to cut loose its regional moorings." It entailed a distinctive spatial logic (the history of which "has yet to be written") of "multi-dimensional relations of domination established along the inter-regional, rural-urban, and city-megacity axes." A distinctive social geography was superimposed upon the Indian national space. But this spawned a variety of regional-ethnic oppositional movements. Hindutva, as invoked by the BIP Hindu nationalist party, exploits "the ideological vulnerability of the placeless universalism of the Nehruvian nation-space" and seeks "to rekindle a personalised commitment to particular places that are nevertheless embedded within the abstract social space of hindutva." Hindutva appeals to what Deshpande calls "the sedimented banalities of neighbourliness - the long-term, live in intimacy of residential relationships among persons and families and between them and their local environment." Deshpande's terms are interesting; it is the banality of mundane, everyday local experiences in the streets and residential areas that defines truths that acquire the status of "self-evident common sense." This forms the basis for a politics (including pathological expressions of intercommunal violence) that is far removed from Kant's cosmopolitanism. The "banalities" of local geographical loyalties disrupt the cosmopolitan ideal of Nehruvian developmentalism (just as spatialities disrupt the grand harmonies of neoclassical economic or rational choice theories).
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Fish and Wildlife sometimes sends problem bears to our land.
I like to imagine that these are the bears that hang out under the bleachers and smoke up.
These are your bears. These are your bears on drugs. Any questions?
Or where the black bears have become so habituated they are untying knots etc.
Is this the hepcat slang replacing "invisible spiders under the skin?"
There's been a fair amount of debate about whether guns are actually any help against bears when wielded by people who are not already experienced at shooting bears.
It's kind of like job hunting. You need experience to get a shot at a bear but how do you get experience if you've never had a shot at a bear?
46.2 --let's not revive the Pistorius debate. No hand grenades.
The undercard could either be McManus v Wolves or Flippanter (in flight suit) v Eagle. I am working it out with the promoters.
If you can have a troubled bank, you can have a troubled bear.
I wouldn't live in Japan, or even visit.
What? Why not?
I would visit Japan if somebody paid my expenses or at my own expense if neb were fighting a bear there.
I would visit any place in which neb were fighting, fucking, or experiencing a profound spiritual awakening with a bear. Except North Korea. Or Wales.
55: Sure they love nature. But only to visit.
Probably to the good since if they decided to live there, "nature" would vanish at an even faster pace than it is already, right?
I would visit any place in which neb were fighting, fucking, or experiencing a profound spiritual awakening with a bear.
Simultaneously.
I imagine in order to fuck the bear, you're going to have to fight it some.
64: Don't like to travel. Have never flown.
"Japan" like every other place, is not the mountain spa, is not the farming village, is not the Ginza. It is all these things and a million more. It takes a lifetime to understand you don't even know your own neighborhood, hell, your own family.
c) But immediacy and direct experience can self-deceive you into thinking you know stuff, much more readily and arrogantly than second-hand and derivative materials. People read Heidegger and think they know Heidegger, all 100 who each knows that the other 99 don't understand jackshit about Heidegger.
d) So I read 10-20 H scholars, understanding that each is an arrogant fool, but aggregated there might be some knowledge to be found. And anyway, the true "Japan" "Heidegger" or "elephant" is in the accounts of the ten blind men. There is no "real" elephant. Sticking with secondary sources helps you understand that, is idealism repellent.
There is no "real" elephant.
I thought that if the elephant was grey and smelled, it wasn't just my alcohol-induced hallucination
Except North Korea. Or Wales.
Racist.
How many of us need to pledge money/travel plans/first borns before neb gives into peer pressure and starts making bear fighting arrangements?
I regret not going to see Wales when I was in England. I like green, hilly places and I've heard Wales excels at that. (Coming from Nebraska, England was green and hilly, but still.)
So I read 10-20 H scholars, understanding that each is an arrogant fool, but aggregated there might be some knowledge to be found. And anyway, the true "Japan" "Heidegger" or "elephant" is in the accounts of the ten blind men. There is no "real" elephant. Sticking with secondary sources helps you understand that, is idealism repellent.
"I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking."
The wikipedia pages of the novels will do that even quicker.
73:Could be a long argument, but shit yeah, I'm gonna reread Axel's Castle before I reread Proust.
Or read Terkel's Working before I try becoming a stevedore. Or Ehrenreich.
Other people's experiences are more valuable and useful to me than my own.
Sue me.
Well, there's always the 'having a profound spiritual experience' option.
Given your highly exacting style, I'm forced to assume the double negative is both deliberate and interpretable as a positive.
I ain't fighting no bear, asilon
What about a koala? Not technically a bear but much more adorable than bears. Possible downside: apparently some crazy-high percentage of koalas is infected with Chlamydia.
much more adorable than bears
Them's fighting words.
FMK: Panda bears, polar bears, and koala bears.
How many 5-year-olds could a panda take in a fight?
The video in 52 is great
Yes it is. Check out part 2, where he builds and tests a bearproof suit.
I see I missed the discussion, but must repeat the advice I received at Glacier National Park 30 yers ago from the rangers about potential bear contacts. The advice was to keep the car windows rolled up. This was not terribly useful advice for me, as I was traveling on bicycle at the time.
[I didn't see any bears, but it was so foggy and drizzly that I didn't even see the glaciers. And they were which were bigger back then. A miserable day.]
FACTS:
1. Bears are mammals.
2. Bears were worshipped ALL the time by peoples who lived in areas populated by bears.
3. The purpose of bears is to flip out and eat grubs, berries, and salmon.
Do you think you're going to win this battle with "facts," neb? You will need the spirit of a bezerker and the courage of 20 men.
I spelled berserker wrong because I have embraced their irrational spirit.
Someone isn't aware of all internet traditions, I see.
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Oh my god! Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are getting divorced! I don't know why I'm shocked, but I am!
Carry on.
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I meant to say. Bears pull the roofs off of Volkswagens ALL the time and don't think twice about it!
Yup I know a thing or two, carry on.
Just like other mammals, bears can be mean or totally awesome!
neb should start the Official Bear Webpage.
I don't know why I'm shocked, but I am!
You must be the only person on earth with internet access who is. She wants sole custody of the child with the made up name that I can never remember; if I was divorcing a Scientologist, so would I.
I actually wrote that ninja page. Well, I didn't but I could have. I just am trying to fight against your retreat into irony and internet memes. Irony and internet memes never killed a bear.
Some men want to kill bears, some men have bears thrust upon them in forest clearings for sport.
There are, in different parts of our country, chances to try so many various kinds of hunting, with rifle or with horse and hound, that it is nearly impossible for one man to have experience of them all. There are many hunts I long hoped to take, but never did and never shall; they must be left for men with more time, or for those whose homes are nearer to the hunting grounds. I have never seen a grisly roped by the riders of the plains, nor a black bear killed with the knife and hounds in the Southern canebrakes; though at one time I had for many years a standing invitation to witness this last feat on a plantation in Arkansas. The friend who gave it, an old backwoods planter, at one time lost almost all his hogs by the numerous bears who infested his neighborhood. He took a grimly humorous revenge each fall by doing his winter killing among the bears instead of among the hogs they had slain; for as the cold weather approached he regularly proceeded to lay in a stock of bear-bacon, scouring the canebrakes in a series of systematic hunts, bringing the quarry to bay with the help of a big pack of hard-fighting mongrels, and then killing it with his long, broad-bladed bowie.