“The Bearfalo”

The narrow lodge pole pine barely shielded me from the danger two hundred feet ahead. I brought my arms in from my sides and grasped the Minolta hanging from the strap around my neck. I lifted the camera to my face. My eyes were locked dead ahead watching for any sign of movement. My breathing became rapid, shallow. As I brought the camera to my eyes, I knocked my sunglasses off my face and they tumbled to the ground. The silence was broken. The sunglasses fell to a bed of brown pine needles three feet away. Dare I reach for them and possibly expose my presence? What started as a fun vacation to Yellowstone National Park suddenly turned into a perilous confrontation.

If I had listened to my wife…how many times have husbands (and wives) repeated those words in history?

The seeds of this drama were planted two years earlier. 

My family – wife and two children, ages eight and six at the time – had visited Yellowstone for a single day in 2006.  We were staying in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for a week and decided to make the drive north and quickly see the sights of the park while we were so close.  The geysers, sulfur pools and especially the wildlife were gripping.  We had to return.  Two years later, we did.

We flew into Jackson Hole again and drove north past the beautiful Grand Tetons.  By the way, look up the history of how the Tetons were named.  Arriving through the south entrance, we ascended to higher and higher elevations.  Fortunately I was driving because the alternative was looking out the windows at the sheer drops on either side of the road.  I don’t like heights.  I am afraid of heights.

Tangent time – ask my children today what my favorite sayings are and I’m certain they will respond with: ‘It’s not where you are, it’s who your with’ or ‘the truth hurts’ or ‘sometimes it’s better to live in the question than to drive for the answer’  In 2006-2008, that list would have also included ‘I am not going to let my fears stop me from doing things’.  My fear of heights isn’t excluded from this but it is my Mount Everest.  More on that later.

Where was I…oh yes, driving in Yellowstone.  One big difference in this trip compared to our last was our selection of music.  I don’t know what we listened to as we drove around in 2008, or even if we listened to anything at all.  In 2006, though, it was the soundtrack to “High School Musical”.  If you don’t know the movie, this is how Wikipedia describes it: ‘A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, High School Musical is a story about two high school juniors from rival cliques’.

I’ve seen all or parts of this movie tens of times, and not once did I think of Romeo and Juliet.  But (prepare for guilty pleasure admission), there are some memorable songs. “Get’cha Head in the Game”, “Breaking Free” and “We’re All in this Together” are my personal favorites.

Sounds like torture?  The alternative to HSM was “Kidz Bop”.  Popular songs are sung by the Kidz Bop Kids, and any lyrics deemed inappropriate are changed.  Fine.  But how can you take Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and make it appropriate, you ask?  Go to YouTube and listen, if you dare.

If I keep going on tangents, this story is never going to make sense or end.  I promise to be more focused from here on out…

Yellowstone.  June.  Family vacation.

We stayed our first few nights at The Old Faithful Inn which is adjacent to the Old Faithful geyser (no, really).  I was less impressed with the boiling water shooting high into the air than I was with its punctuality.  My silent hope was my wife would observe this feature and amend her get-ready routine such that she mimicked this trait.  

Definition:  Pipe dream (noun):  an unattainable or fanciful hope

More impressive than Old Faithful were the sulfur pools that surround it.  The colors were spectacular.  The placards which warn you to stay out were equally fascinating.  The idea that these beautiful, steaming pools are actually 205-degree ponds of battery acid is…wow.

Juxtaposed to these lakes of death were mammoth, fur-shedding buffalo. 

OK, technically they are bison.  Buffaloes are only found in South Asia and Africa, but we Americans have created an identity crisis for these animals by calling them the wrong name for centuries.  By the way, if you’ve seen the movie “Dances With Wolves”, you probably remember the Indians referred to these animals as ‘Tatanka’.  Just in case you think they started this whole call-them-something-they’re-not problem, they didn’t.  Tatanka is a Lakota word which translates to ‘big beast’, not buffalo.

Bison are all over Yellowstone, not just near Old Faithful.  They grazed in the parking lot of our second hotel in the park, Lake Yellowstone Hotel.  They grazed on the sides of most roads.  They blocked roads.  Most memorably, we saw a herd of bison including several calves moving through a forest; to our utter amazement, they were virtually soundless as they moved.  This was no “thundering herd” that shook the ground and could be heard from miles away.  These fellas and ladies were light on their hoofs.

The real prizes of Yellowstone, though, are the grizzly bears and the wolves.  You can pretty much forget about seeing wolves.  There are about one hundred of them in fourteen groups spread across 2.2 million acres.  That means there is one group for every 245 square miles in Yellowstone (if I did the math right…somewhere in the calculation the number 9.5832e10 appeared.  I was intimidated by that number, and it might have affected the accuracy of the answer I came up with.)   Therefore, we focused on finding bears.

We desperately wanted to see a grizzly bear.  As we drove through the park, our eyes were glued to the surrounding forests in hopes of spotting our very own bear.  It’s amazing how many things look a bear when you want to see one. Dozens of times, the cry “I think I saw a bear!” was blurted out excitedly by someone in the car.  Slowing down, pulling to the side of the road, or if traffic permitted, backing up, became commonplace.  Alas, despite all the looking and stopping, we saw exactly zero bears using this method.

Our trip wasn’t solely focused on seeing wild animals.  Did you know that Yellowstone has a Grand Canyon?  It does and it is breathtaking.  The Upper and Lower Falls, Uncle Tom’s Trail, and Artist Point are highlights you shouldn’t miss.  Speaking of high, when you’re standing at elevation admiring these sights, remember there are no handrails, no fences, no barriers of any kind separating you from a 1200-foot drop.  This is acrophobia hell.

My fear of heights extends to everyone around me as well my own situation.  In other words, if I’m safely removed from danger’s edge, but someone else is dangling their feet over a sheer cliff wall, running parallel to it, backing up towards it to take a selfie, or in any other way disrespecting the danger, I feel it.  I feel it just as if it were me in their shoes.  I could have avoided heights by staying in the flatlands of Illinois, but since “I am not going to let my fears stop me from doing things”, I didn’t.

As my family walked a trail along the edge of this canyon, my parental instinct to protect kicked in and I held my eight-year-old daughter’s hand, strictly for her benefit, of course.  At one particularly perilous point, however, she stopped and said to me “Daddy, you’re squeezing my hand too tight.”  I loosened my grip and yet we all still survived, so it was a successful day.  The next day, however, an even greater danger was to cross our path.

Somewhere in life, my wife became laser focused on safety.  The timing is no mystery to me – it began seconds after the birth of our first child.  Since that time, she began the acclaimed lecture series we call “Just So You Know…”.

This wide-ranging series has covered topics as diverse as:

• “Kitty litter – a winter necessity in every car”
• “Echinacea at the first sign of sickness”
• “Don’t talk to me unless you’ve rolled out your IT band”

My personal favorite is the lecture on how to stay safe around cows.

My wife researched hiking dangers and decided we needed to protect against stumbling across bears.  Admittedly, this was amongst the more reasonable JSYK’s we had heard.  One does not want to surprise a bear, grizzly, black or otherwise, particularly one with cubs.  The solution to bear safety we implemented had three components: first, we continually clapped our hands.  Second, we sang or spoke in loud voices to let bears know we were approaching.  Third, we filled a pop can with small rocks and continually shook it.

My first instinct told me that notifying thousand-pound beasts that I was in the vicinity had potentially serious downside associated with it, but my wife assured me that bears weren’t looking for me; in fact they would avoid me if they could.  So, a-clapping, a-singing and a-shaking we went.  I did veto the singing of certain songs just in case – “Breakfast in America”. “Cheeseburger in Paradise”, and “American Pie” were all strictly off-limits.

The trail we hiked this day was heavily wooded to our left but open to the right.  We could see hikers on another trail in the distance on that right side, but no one else was on our trail in front or behind us.  We cautiously, noisily and safely pushed forward and followed the trail around a left bend.

Where my wife stopped dead in her tracks.  “I saw a bear!”

Where?

“Up ahead, in the bushes.  Holy crap, it was massive!”

Where?

“There”

I saw nothing.  Jaded by my experiences in the car earlier, I doubted my wife.  However, she knew what she saw and she grabbed our kids’ hands and instantly abandoned the hike, going back the way we came.  I continued to doubt.

She did the right thing, turning around and running with kids in tow.  You aren’t supposed to run from a bear, but in this case she figured the bear hadn’t seen us and the brush we had just passed provided cover.  I, however, was curious to see if there really was anything up ahead, so I stayed, but moved to the cover of the aforementioned tree and peered around it to see if anything really was in our path.

OK, time for admission of stupidity.  At that moment, I should have retreated with my family.  I put my own safety at risk because I was a curious skeptic.  In the same situation today, I know I would turn around and leave the scene.  In my defense, I was still two hundred feet away (although I’m sure my wife would dispute this distance) and felt this was a safe buffer.

My wife and kids reached a safe distance and stopped.  They had rounded the bend in the path and couldn’t see me so my kids were worried for my safety.  “Where’s Dad?” they asked. My wife assured them I was OK.

I interrupt this story again for an important announcement.  My daughter is my biggest supporter in life.  She is a kind, caring, selfless person, generous with love and frugal with money.  She doesn’t have a materialistic bone in her body.  I now return to the story…

My daughter had the best line at this moment.  She said…

“Who’s going to pay my allowance if something happens to Dad?”

My wife and I still can’t help but laugh hysterically at that comment.

Meanwhile, I continued straining to see anything up ahead and was ready to smugly stroll back to my waiting family, when I saw it.  A huge brown shape emerged from the thick brush into plain view.  I slid behind the tree again and everything stopped – time, breath, heartbeat, everything.  My motor skills still worked, so I peered out again and there it was.

A buffalo.  OK, a bison.

Two hundred feet ahead of me was an enormous bison.  I breathed a sigh of relief which I probably shouldn’t have.  It’s not like bison are docile, cuddly things.  They are dangerous animals who, through no fault of their own, injure more people in Yellowstone than any other creature.  Remembering my wife’s JSYK lecture on buffalo/bison earlier that week, I decided it was best to quickly and carefully leave.  However, I did snap a picture just before the bison wandered back into the brush and out of sight.

I walked briskly back down the trail and found my family waiting.  I felt on the one hand vindicated, but on the other like a terrible father and awful husband.  I relayed what I saw after they left, but they were as skeptical of my bison sighting as I was when my wife first announced seeing the bear ten minutes earlier.  I had photographic evidence, but this was 2008, when film was the medium of recording photos, not digital storage.  We would have to wait until the film was developed before an assessment of who saw what could be conclusively made.

Our trip to Yellowstone ended soon thereafter, and we returned home to Illinois with many wonderful memories and three lessons learned on my part.  First, don’t crush little girls’ hands you are holding when walking along the edge of scary deep canyons.  Second, any sightings of big, dark shapes must lead to movement to safety.  Third, pay more attention to JSYK lectures.  OK, really just two lessons.

We developed the film and the picture showed it was a bison.  I know my wife still doubted that said animal is what she saw.  Unable to completely prove otherwise, our family dubbed the creature a hybrid “Bearfalo”.  We thought we had coined the term, but in writing this story I learned that Bearfalo has an urban dictionary definition. – “a bearlike creature having a humped buffalo-esque back, seeming to exude coolness.  Often referred to as the placeholder at the top of all food chains.”  So I guess they really do exist? 

BTW- in case you’re wondering, we did see a real grizzly bear in Yellowstone on that trip.  Someone told us to look for groups of randomly parked cars, especially if one of them was a ranger vehicle.  The rangers keep a close eye on the humans in the park because they cannot be trusted around grizzly bears.  Or bearfalos.