First Bear Sighting
First of all, to call this a bear encounter is overstating it a bit. I suppose I should call it a bear sighting. Minnie and I were running trails in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Wilderness. This is part of the Nantahala National Forest. It is far west North Carolina. In fact the route I took had me within miles of the Tennessee border.
We had taken Jenkins Meadows up from our campsite in Horse Cove. Hopped onto Haoe Lead and took that along a long ridge line, through Saddle Tree Gap, then down another ridge line where we hooked into Naked Ground that switchbacked us back and forth across Little Santeetlah Creek.
We spotted the bear at really a perfect point. We were on our first switchback on Naked Ground at 6.1 miles into the run. Minnie saw it first and started to quicken her pace to give chase to the fleeing bear. Out of instinct I hollered at Minnie to stop, I have a good intuition on when she is giving chase to something. Normally it turns out to be a squirrel, but today she spotted this bear at about 40 yards. The bear was northwest of us and up the hill. We were headed north and about to hit our switchback sending us southeast. The bear was heading almost directly north. I started to admire the agility of this creature blazing it's own trail through undergrowth and many downed trees. I took a brief moment to scan for any other bears in the area even though I would estimate this bear to be a 2 year old. With no other bears I returned to my admiration of how this thing could move.
One of the concerning, or rather interesting things is that we were just down the hill from where we had came. In fact, if that bear had been where we spotted it, I estimate that we were closer to it as we headed south on the ridge line than where we saw it heading north on our switchback.
It was very cool and I had to call Minnie off 3 times from giving chase. She wanted to hunt that black bear down. It does make me wonder what would've happened if she caught up with it. I picture a Scooby Doo burn out heading back towards me.
I have logged thousands of miles in the woods running and hiking. A lot of times of spiderweb laden trails, meaning the trail definitely haven't been trafficked in a bit. This is my first bear sighting while in the woods. It really goes to show how elusive these animals are. Trail running is twice as fast as hiking and with a similar noise footprint. I sneak up on many animals and sometimes people who I need to be careful not to spook. People don't normally expect a runner while they are having a relaxing hike in the wilderness. Of course maybe I just have more close encounters than I care to think about, I just don’t notice.