March and April are weird months for me in general. Nothing going on, really. Bird season is over and I’m fresh off our annual javelina hunt. Most days, it’s usually cool enough to run the dog, even if the relentless summer sun is beginning to turn up the thermostat.
It’s dry here, and unfortunately, this winter has been even drier than usual at the most-needed window. We’ve had a good couple of years and at this point all we can do is sit back and hope that all of that progress hasn’t been erased entirely. Even still, the cactus and Indian paintbrush and lupine will bloom and turn the scrub into one of the most beautiful places imaginable. That’s what spring means down here.
In much of the West, it also means spring bear season, and that’s where my mind currently lives… rent-free.
It’s funny — everyone pines for October, of course, but the hunts I look forward to the most are usually those freebies. Those over-the-counter ones you can always count on. Perhaps simply because there’s less pressure on yourself to come home with meat in the freezer, or perhaps because it allows you to pick an area and get to know it like the back of your hand.
I have never approached my spring bear trips up North in this way. For the last four years, I’ve bounced quasi-aimlessly from one mountain range to another, driven by a wanderlust for the places I never knew growing up. Success — in the usual sense of the word — has been rather minimal. After a cumulative month in the mountains, I have yet to tally one mere sighting of Ursus americanus.
Despite having a few decent excuses for it, the stench of repeated failure does taint this endeavor a bit for me at this point. I understand the importance of the words carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, but truly knowing thyself is more difficult for me than it should be. Why do I feel shame at coming home empty-handed? Is it because that fact itself actually bothers me, or is it because of the 21st Century self-consciousness imbued by the persistent, if usually unspoken, online judgement of others?
The more I ponder this, the more sure I become that it’s the latter of the two things. There are more important things at play here than a grip’n’grin.
I am a perennial visitor to the black bear woods and never to be a resident, limited by time and by mileage.
The variable nature of, well… everything about these places throws a few wrenches into the works if you have to take your best guess and block off a week on a calendar far in advance. The snowpack and snowline are alive and receding like the hairline of your worst nightmares — unpredictably and without reprieve.
To date, I’ve gone up at the middle to the end of May without deviation. Everything except the highest peaks has been accessible to man and bear and the forest roads have been well-traversed and cleared of all wintertime blowdown. While this might sound like a good thing, I’ve come to understand that this relative ease of access is likely working against me.
The bears must be kept down. For the good of the hunt.
My eye glances at the calendar now; I had intended to head up the end of the first week in May to see about erring the other way, but I might go even earlier. Right after I ship this article, perhaps. From what I understand it’s been an average winter up North, and this uncertainty is the centerpiece of everything when it comes to this tag of mine. It could be too early.
Where is the snow? It’s hard to paint a perfect image in your mind unless you are in it. I use a couple OSINT tools to gather as much information as I can. I pull up traffic cameras on the DOT websites and review satellite imagery and SNOTEL data. It’s good — it will get you maybe sixty or seventy percent of the way there — but sometimes figures and numbers don’t translate as well as you’d prefer. Or, everything looks burned off until you get up there and are navigating timbered forest roads on the South faces and make the unpleasant discovery that everything on that side of the mountain is still snowed in. At this point, I’m not terrible at reading the tea leaves, but nothing in this domain is set in stone and always, absolutely knowable to a foreigner anyway.
This twisted anticipation at the forefront — how will things look when I get up there? — is one of the things that keeps me coming back, like some sort of adrenaline junky hooked on an eight second ride. Uncertainty is a scarce commodity these days, but it brings with it Possibility.
The anticipation builds over the fourteen-hour drive up, and by the time I arrive it’s usually too dark to tell much. I get a fitful and excited night of sleep, sleep in just a bit so I can get a lay of the land from where I’m camped when I rise… and only then am I finally welcomed into the bear woods.
But not for forever. I’m just passing through. This place will spit me back out in a week, successful or not; maybe to return in September, or maybe not.
This week is a waypost for the year — something to count down to, and something to count down from. The days will be pleasant and the nights will be cold and everything will be wet with spring rain and bursting with life while conditions allow. The bears will be on the roam for fresh greenup and elk calves.
The hunt will be a grind. The process will be the point. It’s a wonderful time of year.
