Boy Scouts and Hungry Bears

by Fredric L. Rice

Most trail work in the Angeles National Forest doesn’t end with pounding Yogi Bear into unconsciousness with a frying pan, but that’s what last weekend’s effort to repair and rebuild the Golden Cup Nature Trail nearly came to. Saturday night ended with eight or nine Boy Scouts and myself spending an hour in the dark surrounded by hungry and aggressive bears while we packed our stuff and fled.

Friday evening I sat below the mountain at the Forest Service’s check-in station reading commentary on Edward Abbey’s early life while waiting for my ride up the mountain.

While I read, a number of Sheriff cruisers slowed down to give me a good looking over before speeding back up and heading up the canyons in search of evil doers. When I have my bright orange single speed bicycle with me, the cops up here know me and don’t bother checking me out -- but alas my bicycle is dead, 30-year-old rear axle waiting for replacement parts that are no longer manufactured.

Behind me a section of the San Gabriel River screamed through a 12-inch pipe into a culvert, spreading out and quieting to water an endless parade of commercial potted plants. Under me swarms of ants invaded my shoes, socks, pants, then shirt, (causing a bit of exercise as I jumped up and down swatting myself while screaming “argh!”). Before me the SUVs with their drunk and stoned drivers swerved their way from my left to my right, heading up the canyons and -- for some of them, we can hope, -- a mangled, drunken death.

The Caretaker arrived in his light pickup truck into which I tossed my bright orange canvas backpack (purchased in 1978) and my borrowed 10-speed bicycle and together we were swept up the mountain with the ease of a magic carpet.

On foot pushing my old bicycle it would usually take me two and a half hours to get to the Rincon Fire Station and from there another two or three hours to the Crystal Lake Recreation Area in the San Gabriel Mountains, part of the Angeles National Forest. In the old Toyota pickup every mile that’s usually a sweet agony to traverse on foot is now a swift, blurred, and effortless glide up the mountain.

The area has been closed since 2002 when a series of fires and floods swept through the canyons and the effort to rebuild and reopen the grounds have seen volunteers like me and the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders team up with Boy Scout troops. Because of the altitude I’ve been heading up the mountains the night before the trail work in an effort to become acclimated to the altitude before the actual hard work begins. That way I don’t end the day throwing up and blacking out with exhaustion -- getting older every day, alas.

The road is closed at around mile marker 29.6, a huge and heavy series of metal pipes that cross Highway 39, Azusa Blvd. which used to go all the way up to Highway number 2 -- Angeles Crest Highway. But the obstacle proves no problem because The Caretaker has a key and the gate swings wide, swallows us up, and closes tightly behind us.

I spent Friday night in the actual campgrounds across from the U. S. Forest Service’s Visitor Center, (which I cleaned up months ago!) something I very rarely do since I prefer hiking far outside the Recreation Area and into the designated wilderness. Tonight was different since I needed to have my camp in an area that could be seen by the other volunteers who would arrive in the morning, and I knew that Saturday night there would be Boy Scout volunteers staying over and since I would have the USFS radio and keys, I’d need to be close enough to help if there were any problems.

In my tent by the light of a small, light weight flashlight I continued to read of Edward Abbey’s early years from printed pages I’d taken off of the Internet that morning. Ed’s life was quite a bit different than his fictionalized autobiographical recollections he’d written about so often. Much was undeniably true -- the many occasions of his near death while hiking and camping alone in the wilds, for example, when his water or luck ran out. Only after sitting down and crying a while, followed by hard work to survive did Ed always win out in the end -- only to love the wilderness so much to step out and risk his life all over again.

While I was reading a bear started pawing my tent and tore off the little metal peg on one corner that my tent pole plugs in to, prompting me to kick the side of my old tent which made the bear run off, causing the tent to sag to one side.

I’d known there were bears scrounging through the grounds because every weekend I collected the garbage they pulled out of the supposedly bear-proof trash dumpsters, and this Friday night I had cleaned up after them once again. (A weel ago I printed and taped notices to all the dumpsters asking people to cart their trash down the mountain instead of using the dumpsters, if they would, please.) Also The Caretaker up there had had a bear cub in his cabin after his mother (the bear’s mother) had pulled a window apart wide enough for the sub to enter.

Ben -- the coordinator for the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders -- suggested that the bears are getting ready for the Winter and that may very well account for why the bears were aggressive for the past three weeks or so. Thing is, though, I’ve been camping and hiking alone in these mountains for some 20 years, the last year of which being spent up at higher altitude among Bear Country, and I’ve never had a problem with bears, only with humans.

After the bear left I lay there wondering if I should be scared -- at least a little bit. What would Ed have done? I think I’m maybe 140 or 150 pounds in weight, clawless and generally hairless. Edward Abbey was a giant covered in fur and -- I’d bet real money just to judge from photographs of the guy -- with claws to equal anything that California Black Bears could offer to rake a forest volunteer with. I don’t recall ever reading about Ed playing with bears. He’d once taken a trip to Alaska to observe grizzlies in the wild yet he and his scientist buddy who took the trip never found any, causing Ed to forever after refer to grizzly bears as “the alleged grizzly.”

So I went to sleep with ear phones on, listening to John Denver on my old MP3 player, drowning out the sound of bears huffing and pawing around my tent. What you don’t hear can’t rip you into strips, I reasoned, and apparently I was right because I awoke early, examined the damage to the tent, offered an annoyed curse or two at Yogi, Booboo, and all things Ursine. Either my tent kicking had kept them at bay or my singing “Rockey Mountain High” at the top of my lungs did, come to think of it.

I jogged down to Soldier Creek, chucked off my clothes in the cold morning air, and jumped in to scrub with sand for my morning shower. This late in the season the flowers and brush has grown heavy along the creek and access to the cold, fresh water has become so difficult that from the bottom of the ravine I can see a number of slides where deer, bear, and other animals have crashed through the brush to the water below. Looking back I see that the path I had taken down to the water was also crushed by heavy animals.

A few feet further down is a block of “California granite” upon which I parked myself, drying and waiting for the Sun to crest the mountain range in front of me. Hawks ply the cold morning air high above me.

Some two or three hours later the Trailbuilder and Boy Scout volunteers arrive. I mentioned “bears in the night” but didn’t think much about it from then on.

Golden Cup Nature Trail is a fairly short hike on the grounds of Crystal Lake along which some four or five informational placards greet hikers -- families with small children for this trail is intended for kids -- with brief comments about the flora and fauna in these parts -- comments offered in Spanish as well as English since this is Southern California and overwhelmingly the visitors to this area in the past have been Hispanic.

The previous survey of the trail taken two weeks ago yielded the conclusion -- at least in my mind -- that months of man/woman-hours of hot, sweaty work would be needed to restore the flooded sections of the trail. Much of it was covered in wood chips, set there by construction crews who had felled diseased trees and shredded their poor limbs. Much of the trail was exposed rocks and boulders with the sand and dirt washed away, presumably now resting at the base of the San Gabriel and Morris dams.

California Bayonet Yucca was busy colonizing the trail and a plant that likes to grow in the aftermath of forest fires had nearly choked the trail off completely in some areas. Tree limbs that had felled from burned trees needed to be bucked into sections small enough to drag off though we noticed that one of the burned trees that had been felled and dropped on to the trail some months ago had been cut up and removed by construction workers.

Ben and Tom from the professional Trailbuilders volunteers offered a safety rundown as well as a brief coverage of how the tools are used. Safety is the number one concern when working in damaged areas of the National Forest, and the professional crews keep a constant look out for potential safety hazards -- such as burned or hanging tree limbs and “hunters” illegally occupying the grounds while often setting fires.

After the safety briefing, the Boy Scouts got immediately to work digging into a large pile of wood chips that had buried the start of the trail -- they dug out probably 20 cubic feet of wood chips, piling it on to either side of the trail where others raked it back and spread it out further, uncovering the trailhead.

Loppers and McClouds were used for most of the rest of the trail. The brush and trees that line much of the trail were cut back to a distance of some three feet on either side -- or at least that was the plan. Since sand and gravel must be brought in, and since there’s at least two sections of the trail that will require rock walls or bridges to be built, the trail must be wide enough for rented trail building equipment to be brought in, and the effort that morning was geared toward making some mechanized assistance possible.

For a first effort Saturday went extremely well. Because of the cool temperature it wasn’t the hot and sweaty work that I thought it would be -- as it has been for the past three months, any way. The majority of the trail was worked to a variety of degrees and while no actual tread work was done, most of the brush was removed from the trail. Mike and Tom worked on carefully trimming back Bayonet Yucca and I noticed that Jannet worked carefully on the far end of the trail on the far side of one of the major washout.

I spent the morning on an iron rake and pulling out plants with my heavy gloves. Ironically I don’t much enjoy ripping living things out of the ground and tossing them away to dry and suffocate to death. When I joined two other professional Trailbuilders a year ago to acquire our chain saw certification from the Arroyo Seco Hotshot Fire Crew, the instructor downed two healthy trees that had been marked for removal by the US Forest Service, and watching those two trees die was a sad thing.

The sap of innumerable plants have sullied my hands since I joined the San Gabriel Mountains Trailbuilders, and the irony of culling plant life when I virtually worship nature might well approach the level of hypocrisy.

Yet I do this work for a number of reasons -- I like to think that having places where children can get out of the stink and filth of the city said children can see that there’s more to life than asphalt, concrete, cars, stink, and crime. To be sure people bring all of that with them when they come up here, but I like to think that a child slipping away from his or her parents to walk these mountain trails in safety and solitude will leave a lasting impression and respect or love for nature.

It’s great seeing Boy Scouts, High School volunteers, and College students getting out of the city and volunteering their time up here. If the actual work gets wiped out in the next heavy rain, it’s still not a pointless effort since the kids don’t just come to sweat and at times bleed, they come and take away memories back down the mountain with them, and that’s always worth while.

With the afternoon upon us, we halted work on Golden Cup and collected at the staging area for our reward: cans of iced fruit juice and soda. We discuss many things, including how much work was accomplished and how much still needs to be done. Day number one was a good start and after actually getting a day in, I believe that the initial estimate of work to be done was too large. With rented equipment to help haul the sand, gravel, and rocks that we’ll need, restoration of this trail won’t take as long as I had thought. We’ll be installing water bars aplenty along the way to limit future erosion, of course, and if we can borrow the small tractor we need, when we’re finished we’ll be left with a trail that will survive well with minimal work into the far future -- like other trails up here have survived.

The rest of the Trailbuilder crews headed back down the mountain -- after having a little trouble with the barricade down at mile marker 29.6 but eventually they all made it back down, leaving the Boy Scout troop and I to spend the night in the grounds.

I was back in my damaged tent reading Edward Abbey’s biography again when I heard yelling from the Scout camp. They had seen bears walking around The Caretaker’s cabin and, indeed, a few minutes later I heard an air horn honking and cookware being banged together at the Caretaker’s cabin as he and his brother drove the bears off. The bears had been standing on their back feet at the front door of the cabin pressed up against it.

Some minutes later I was trying to continue to read and heard more yelling accompanied by pots and pans being pounded together at the Boy Scout camp and I had to smile a little. They were having bears pawing around their tents and were trying to get them to leave -- which they succeeded in doing because my tent was once again visited by a bear, this one walking around it at a distance of some 10 feet.

Since I’d listened to the Scouts yelling and since the bear wasn’t leaving when I yelled at it, I zipped up my tent and walked over to the Scouts’ camp just to see how they were taking the bears and they all seemed fine about it so I walked back to my tent.

As I approached my tent I could hear that the bear had gotten inside of it and was ripping things up. I started yelling and it came out dragging my old canvas backpack which really got me yelling. I continued to walk toward it yelling so it let go of my backpack, huffed loudly, and ran toward me.

I ran forward too and jumped on top of the concrete picnic table thinking about taking off one of my sneakers to beat it in the face with, if I had to, and instead my hand found my old frying pan that I cart around but never use, and I used that to beat against the table. Together with my yelling the noise caused the bear to stop fast and double back to where it ran for about 30 feet before stopping and turning to look at me, pacing back and forth -- probably while contemplating what vegetarian forest volunteers taste like.

I jumped off of the table while still holding my frying pan weapon and -- while keeping an eye on the bear -- I dragged my brown canvas knapsack out, stuffed some things into it, crammed the Forest Service radio on top, and walked a wide circle around the bear back to the Boy Scout camp.

At the camp they were gathered together a bit playing their flashlights around the trees picking out bears and deer -- anything that moved, including me. It turned out that the two adults in their group had been walking toward their camp and had been charged by a bear. They stopped in their tracks and while one “soiled myself,” (he didn’t really) the other started yelling and stomping his foot after which the other adult did likewise, causing the bear to turn and run.

I showed up at their camp to mention that a bear had shredded my tent and wrecked my beloved old backpack, veteran of -- well veteran of probably a quarter of a million miles of desert, beach, and forest hikes and camp outs over the past three decades.

Because safety is the primary concern, the adults decided it would be safest to pack up and head down the mountain. Otherwise it would be a long and tiring night of driving off bears.

Over the next hour the bears walked around and into the camp only to be spotlighted by numerous flashlights and to be driven off with pounding cookware and yelling boys. Eventually everything got packed up -- at least everything we could find in the dark -- and we left, abandoning my tent and the remains of my poor old backpack. I also left my borrowed ten-speed bicycle up there along with some paperwork for the Forest Service which I figured would be fitting food for bears to eat.

Funny thing is, though, I think there were only three bears in all, two adults and one yearling. (The deer that plague wide canyon added their confusion to the mix.) The bear that I got a good look at in the pickup truck’s headlights as we left was a big female adult. A bear I’d heard scratching itself up and down trees and had seen last week end was just a cub but I didn’t see it this week end.

Would Edward Abbey had crammed a sack with his belongings and fled back down the mountain like I had done? I don’t think so. I like to think that I wouldn’t have either, had I been alone, since for a fleeting instant I saw myself sitting on my picnic table, frying pan in hand, dozing off and on while occasionally pounding the table all night, huddled with my sleeping bag around me.

Leaving the mountain, being brought down in effortless ease in a huge air-conditioned pickup truck this time, I had to smile at the darkness speeding past on the other side of the window. The bears up here deserve to win; it’s the humans that should ultimately be driven off since it’s the humans who are the invaders. These bears are usually sedate, grandly sedentary, totally unperturbed and unperturbable, of a mind to ignore the screaming primates who brings with them food -- deserving bear treats, in their opinion.

Next weekend we return to Golden Cup and -- for me -- another two nights of laying myself out as an offering of bear chow. This time I’ll be prepared. I’m bringing with me an extra large frying pan.