ADK CAMPING BEAR ENCOUNTER #4

The final encounter that I would like to write about took place in 2011 on a camping trip in Inlet, NY. My family went camping with a church youth group at Limekiln State Campground. I have camped there several times before but we have only heard people share around the campfire about bears breaking into cars, campers, and even tents in search of food. In the years prior we have never encountered a bear during daylight hours only well after dark, when we could faintly see the bear outline lurking between campsites.

 At check-in I always like to ask the campground rangers on the bear activity and sightings. Like always they said, " Oh yes, they are here, out and about!" They also warned that a cub has been hanging around a little more than usual. And so like every year, I thought we just hear the stories but in reality never see them. 

But this year was different. As soon as we had set up our tents and started to prepare a late lunch, the cub everyone has been talking about came to say "hello." The cub was far from full size but it wasn't small either. It came from behind our campsites where there was a wooded area with low brush. It minded it's own business but it was definitely a show spectacle for many campers who just checked in. Many of us followed it from a distance as it went from one unoccupied site to another, looking for food. 

This day one sighting was only the beginning. The same day we saw the bear two more times. And in the following days we saw the bear on average 3 times a day. One of those days, after we ate lunch and all of the remaining food was put away in the bear resistant lockers that are part of every campsite,  I was sitting alone reading a book and there came along the cub again. As soon as I stood up and was going to go and grab something to make noise with, it got startled and ran away. 

Over the course of our camping trip the bear was seen but we didn't hear of it actually breaking into any of the campers property. We did hear the rangers discuss the possibility of tranquilizing the bear and removing it from the campground if it continued to hang around. But we never found out what actually happened to the cub before we left.