California, 2012, 6

In which we meet Joe Btlspflk, a fool, and a very large bear

Hiking gives one appetite and thirst. Energy bars and trail mix, when chosen wisely, deal with the hunger. Water at close to body heat satisfies the inner engine's requirements, but it does build up a psychological desire for something really cold. As usual with us, there were no bears, no deer for a change, but we had the company of a very stubborn raven at lunch.

I'm convinced that Dewey Point isn't named for an individual, but from the universal question among hikers there. "Do we go on from here, or turn around and head back?" Motivation initially overruled legs and we set off for the next promontory west, Crocker Point. This added two mile round trip would give us a first day's hike of ten-ish miles and bragging rights pertaining thereto.

The motivation didn't last more than halfway. Realism said we needed some energy for the next several day's hikes. Em looked like she wanted to send for his and hers walkers for us.

We had not gone long on the return trip before we began talking about the next stages of our plans. At this point, I thought I'd prevailed, at least with Em, and that evidence-based decision making would rule. At this point Em piped up to say, "Oh, I thought you understood. The latest hantavirus case was at Tuolumne Meadows." Tuolumne Meadows was where we meant to spend the second half of the trip.

People who know my wife well call her determined when she is on their side of an issue, and stubborn otherwise. At this moment she became stubborn. Just how stubborn? Try to envision a person simultaneously hiking forward and digging her heels in. I had pledged at the start of this trip to observe majority rule and to avoid being a grouch as much as possible. It took only a few minutes of conversation to show me I was in the minority. I acquired two concessions. First, that the majority would do all it could to get facts from someone in authority before writing off Tuolumne, rather than relying solely upon news stories meant to gin up numbers.* Second, that if we did stay with the squirrels at Housekeeping Camps, we'd leave a day early to have a little time for San Francisco.

I was still grouchy, and felt I'd been had. So that my ill temper wouldn't show too much, instead of swapping positions as we had done coming up, I took permanent last place, where the dust cloud would obscure the Joe Btlspflk** cloud over my head. I felt then, and still do, that my last chance at staying in the high country had come and gone because of panic over a half-million to one risk.

By the time we reached the car, hunger, thirst and an urgent need for a privy helped to distract attention from my mood. We drove down to the nearest john, then headed for the camp, when something happened that distracted all of us.

Em came around a slight curve and jammed on the brakes. In front of us were stacked up half a dozen cars, all over the road, with doors open and people outside. "Accident?" I said aloud. Em pointed into the woods across the road: "No, a bear. And look!"

I have seen few live bears, only one in the wild on the last trip, but I have seen several dead, and I can't recall seeing a bigger black bear than this one. It was very lean, or I would have put it above 350 pounds. As it was, call it 275-300 pounds: cocoa coloured. And there was also a man; presumably the driver of one of the cars ahead. He was stepping through the brush directly toward the bear with a camera to his face.

I was always told this about bears: when they stand up and roar, they don't want to fight you. They want you to be scared and get lost. It usually works. When they don't stand up is when they mean business, and you want to act like Bigfoot whilst backing slowly away, and things end up with both you and the bear backing away.

This bear did not stand up (bad sign #1), and this bear was not backing away (bad sign #2). He (I say he from the size) was trying to move off to the man's side, shaking his head (bad sign #3). Even from some distance off, I could see his shoulder muscles flexing (bad sign #4). This was no Yogi Bear: this was a high country bear in a very bad mood.

So then, here's Camera-Boy, already no more than 30 feet away from a very uncooperative bear. What does he do? He goes closer, still with a face full of camera. When the bear started sidling around him, giving (to me) a convincing demonstration of a very pissed-off bear, the idiot cut the bear off. They were now about 20 feet apart. Had the bear turned on the fool then, nothing short of a high-power rifle already aimed could have spared the man from a severe mauling, at least: a bear can leap 20 feet in a second.

We then had one of those "time slows down" moments: I don't know for sure how long the standoff lasted. At the end, I guess, the blowdowns and the underbrush made the man pause, pause just long enough for the bear to break away. He still didn't run; just kept up his sidling until he was able to disappear. The motorists, with the surly reluctance of a crowd breaking up after a car wreck, began to get back in their cars, and enough of them moved out to break up the bear jam. When we got going, I think Camera-Boy was still in the woods, looking for the bear.

Last trip, and this one, I've seen people pull potentially dangerous stunts with deer (more on this later). On farms, they can be similarly stupid around livestock. This was an act of the most incredible, willful stupidity, the most brazen I've ever seen. In those slow-mo moments of the standoff, one felt as if one chance thing, or one still more stupid act, would set the whole tragedy in motion, a tragedy in which the bystanders could have done almost nothing for the victim. One chance, one second, one tick of the clock: life, death, or mutilation. The bear looked unhealthy, and I'm glad it got away. But I'd consider mauling Camera-Boy, or any of the other jackasses who left their cars to be spectators.

Linux subsidio est.

-----------------------------------------------------
* Late news. My skepticism was justified, as I would have found had we brought a laptop. An NPS bulletin that went online a couple of days later said that the latest case was tied only to one of four High Sierras Camps, including Tuolumne Meadows Lodge. And it wasn't a fatality. It was a case so mild that the patient didn't realise he had it until the media hype led him to his physician, by which time it was about over.  But we're all panicking about fungal meningitis now, so who cares?

**You'll have to click the link to see Joe. The Al Capp people are very anal about their intellectual property rights, although that seems like an odd term to apply to L'il Abner.

Yo-Ho, part deux, 6: in which we meet Joe Btlspflk, a fool, and a very large bear

Hiking gives one appetite and thirst. Energy bars and trail mix, when chosen wisely, deal with the hunger. Water at close to body heat satisfies the inner engine's requirements, but it does build up a psychological desire for something really cold. As usual with us, there were no bears, no deer for a change, but we had the company of a very stubborn raven at lunch.

I'm convinced that Dewey Point isn't named for an individual, but from the universal question among hikers there. "Do we go on from here, or turn around and head back?" Motivation initially overruled legs and we set off for the next promontory west, Crocker Point. This added two mile round trip would give us a first day's hike of ten-ish miles and bragging rights pertaining thereto.

The motivation didn't last more than halfway. Realism said we needed some energy for the next several day's hikes. Em looked like she wanted to send for his and hers walkers for us.

We had not gone long on the return trip before we began talking about the next stages of our plans. At this point, I thought I'd prevailed, at least with Em, and that evidence-based decision making would rule. At this point Em piped up to say, "Oh, I thought you understood. The latest hantavirus case was at Tuolumne Meadows." Tuolumne Meadows was where we meant to spend the second half of the trip.

People who know my wife well call her determined when she is on their side of an issue, and stubborn otherwise. At this moment she became stubborn. Just how stubborn? Try to envision a person simultaneously hiking forward and digging her heels in. I had pledged at the start of this trip to observe majority rule and to avoid being a grouch as much as possible. It took only a few minutes of conversation to show me I was in the minority. I acquired two concessions. First, that the majority would do all it could to get facts from someone in authority before writing off Tuolumne, rather than relying solely upon news stories meant to gin up numbers.* Second, that if we did stay with the squirrels at Housekeeping Camps, we'd leave a day early to have a little time for San Francisco.

I was still grouchy, and felt I'd been had. So that my ill temper wouldn't show too much, instead of swapping positions as we had done coming up, I took permanent last place, where the dust cloud would obscure the Joe Btlspflk** cloud over my head. I felt then, and still do, that my last chance at staying in the high country had come and gone because of panic over a half-million to one risk.

By the time we reached the car, hunger, thirst and an urgent need for a privy helped to distract attention from my mood. We drove down to the nearest john, then headed for the camp, when something happened that distracted all of us.

Em came around a slight curve and jammed on the brakes. In front of us were stacked up half a dozen cars, all over the road, with doors open and people outside. "Accident?" I said aloud. Em pointed into the woods across the road: "No, a bear. And look!"

I have seen few live bears, only one in the wild on the last trip, but I have seen several dead, and I can't recall seeing a bigger black bear than this one. It was very lean, or I would have put it above 350 pounds. As it was, call it 275-300 pounds: cocoa coloured. And there was also a man; presumably the driver of one of the cars ahead. He was stepping through the brush directly toward the bear with a camera to his face.

I was always told this about bears: when they stand up and roar, they don't want to fight you. They want you to be scared and get lost. It usually works. When they don't stand up is when they mean business, and you want to act like Bigfoot whilst backing slowly away, and things end up with both you and the bear backing away.

This bear did not stand up (bad sign #1), and this bear was not backing away (bad sign #2). He (I say he from the size) was trying to move off to the man's side, shaking his head (bad sign #3). Even from some distance off, I could see his shoulder muscles flexing (bad sign #4). This was no Yogi Bear: this was a high country bear in a very bad mood.

So then, here's Camera-Boy, already no more than 30 feet away from a very uncooperative bear. What does he do? He goes closer, still with a face full of camera. When the bear started sidling around him, giving (to me) a convincing demonstration of a very pissed-off bear, the idiot cut the bear off. They were now about 20 feet apart. Had the bear turned on the fool then, nothing short of a high-power rifle already aimed could have spared the man from a severe mauling, at least: a bear can leap 20 feet in a second. We then had one of those "time slows down" moments: I don't know for sure how long the standoff lasted. At the end, I guess, the blowdowns and the underbrush made the man pause, pause just long enough for the bear to break away. He still didn't run; just kept up his sidling until he was able to disappear. The motorists, with the surly reluctance of a crowd breaking up after a car wreck, began to get back in their cars, and enough of them moved out to break up the bear jam. When we got going, I think Camera-Boy was still in the woods, looking for the bear.

Last trip, and this one, I've seen people pull potentially dangerous stunts with deer (more on this later). On farms, they can be similarly stupid around livestock. This was an act of the most incredible, willful stupidity, the most brazen I've ever seen. In those slow-mo moments of the standoff, one felt as if one chance thing, or one still more stupid act, would set the whole tragedy in motion, a tragedy in which the bystanders could have done almost nothing for the victim. One chance, one second, one tick of the clock: life, death, or mutilation. The bear looked unhealthy, and I'm glad it got away. But I'd consider mauling Camera-Boy, or any of the other jackasses who left their cars to be spectators.

-----------------------------------------------------
* Late news. My skepticism was justified, as I would have found had we brought a laptop. An NPS bulletin that went online a couple of days later said that the latest case was tied only to one of four High Sierras Camps, including Tuolumne Meadows Lodge. And it wasn't a fatality. It was a case so mild that the patient didn't realise he had it until the media hype led him to his physician, by which time it was about over.  But we're all panicking about fungal meningitis now, so who cares?

**You'll have to click the link to see Joe. The Al Capp people are very anal about their intellectual property rights, although that seems like an odd term to apply to L'il Abner.

Yo-Ho part deux is on the horizon

In ten days or so we depart for Cali again: a couple of days in the Bay area, followed by a week in Yosemite. Even if a wish were to take me back in a moment to my beloved White Mountains forever, that wish would have tough competition from both destinations. San Francisco and the East Bay are all Massachusetts could be if Massachusetts didn't have its head permanently stuck up its arse. Yosemite is easy to describe, but hard to comprehend if you haven't been there. Go there, even if you have to walk.

This time we get to go slightly off-season, when many of the thicker variety of tourist will have crawled back under their rocks. This is good in some ways, bad in others. It's chiefly bad in depriving us of much of the unintended comedy.

My notes from the past Yosemite trip have inspired some mule-based and bear-based humour from those who know me in real life. When I introduced Hobbes, my unique mule, I mentioned that I brought to the encounter a sorry record in equine relations. In large measure, Hobbes cured this: he even improved my posture in the saddle.

Bears are another matter. Intellectually, a childhood in the boonies, and country relations who still have bears in the backyard, have given me a healthy respect for campground pests that weigh upward of 200 pounds and don't understand when the treats are gone. Emotionally, yes, I'm a little bit afraid of bears. For good reasons.

One of my earliest memories was of a father pulled into damage control over a horrible tragedy. There was a wildlife exhibit in the White Mountains that attracted tourists. It included a couple of bears. My brother and I had seen all this. The bears escaped their cage, killed a couple of people and horribly mauled several others, one of whom we had met. My parents didn't sugar-coat their conversations about this, and we as children were somewhat shaken by the story.

It was some years before this wildlife exhibit had bears again. When they did, the bears were yearlings raised in captivity. My brother and I were brought to meet the new bears, to see them and wrestle with them. The last was not entirely voluntary. The bears were our equal in size, but a good deal stronger. (My father had odd ideas about child rearing.) Unlike some people skeptical of the strength and intelligence of these animals, I've experienced it firsthand. It was enough of a challenge with ostensibly friendly bears, and I have no wish to test the goodwill of a wild bear. A little fear of bears is healthy: it minimises the sort of dumb mistakes that usually precede bear incidents, and remember: the National Park Service is mostly on the bears' side, even when they're caught red-handed with your pick-a-nick basket.

We expect to spend half of our stay in Tuolumne Meadows, where the trailheads average 8000 feet, where the only showers are open just from noon to 3 p.m., and where bears are as common as squirrels. It's also a place where one gets to hike through scenery that is simply beyond breathtaking, where cell phones and Wi-Fi don't happen. It is a good place in which to apply healthy caution about one's wild company.

We will shower before we fly home.

At least the count is even

I went to Yosemite last year rather well schooled in the innate stupidity of homo turistus. I was pretty much brought up in the business and had at least collateral acquaintance with it for the first half of my life. It was, then, no surprise to learn that, as of late August last year, motorists had killed 13 or so bears that season. It was also no shock to see happy campers dodging past fences and "keep out" signs to dip in their overheated bodies into the 55 degree water of pools just a few yards upstream of waterfalls 100 or more feet high. That was at the end of a parching hot summer, even by Sierras standards, that had lowered flow rates and raised water temperatures throughout the valley. These show Vernal Falls from top and bottom at its most benign. (There were people swimming within 50 meters of the top of the fall.)
















Eleven months later, the Sierras haven't yet disgorged the snowmelt of one of the worst winters in a century. Skiing has slowed or stopped not so much due to lack of opportunity as sheer ennui: I have that from the offspring. She also reported that her group's attempt on Mount Whitney on Memorial Day was turned back by blizzard conditions, near-zero temperatures and a selection of routes that varied from near-vertical to vertical: something like Nordwand set in California.

All this means the waters of Yosemite are enthralling to look at this year, but at their malevolent best at disposing of h. turistus. Thus we hear today that this season's death toll due to Yosemite drownings has risen to six. It appears (surprise!) that tourist negligence was the chief factor in these deaths.

The news sent me to the Park's Web site for a tally of another sort. This year to July 9, motorists in Yosemite have killed six bears. There must be a sort of ursine schadenfreude in the notion that the score is now tied.

(Mr. Hobbes tweets to ask, "now who's the jackass?")

Getting no respect

That's as good a way as any to bring together some unrelated topics.

First, there's "My name is Earl," who lost his sense of direction on the way to New England. I'm no fan of big hurricanes: I can remember some pretty scary moments as a child during Hurricane Carol. However, I'd like a modest return on the investment in storm preparations at a time of year when one doesn't have to remove the outcome with a snowblower. That storm had no respect.

Then there's the matter of Yosemite bears. Readers will quickly recall that this family unit spent seven days searching for bears with no results until the final hours of our visit. My daughter reports that during her three days of Labour Day hiking, climbing and camping in the Tuolomne back country, she saw five. The bears have no respect.

Finally--for the moment--this week I've started a job I've been working toward for five years. Today, at the end of my second day on the job, I come home to find, of course, a summons for jury duty.

I wouldn't find this as annoying if Massachusetts' celebrated "one day-one trial" jury system lived up to its claims of even-handedness. I can hardly count the people I know who have lived much or all of their adult lives under this system and have never been called. I've been called, with this one, eight or nine times and served on two juries. My wife, the jurisprudence junkie, was well behind my score but is catching up: she also got a summons today.

Fortunately, I'm going to a court where the odds are that I'll know at least one attorney, and it's not until December. Still, the Massachusetts court system has no respect.

Yo-Ho, Part 7

In Which Ursus Americanus Finally Makes his Appearance...at Least Once

This being the last day for the parents to frolic in Yosemite, it seemed necessary to hike again, Dr. Morton notwithstanding. We decided upon a double-header. The trails to Taft Point and Sentinel Dome start from the same trailhead off the road to Glacier Point. The first is about 2.5 miles round trip, the second around 3.5*. This offered, then, a total round trip around six miles, with the chance to get back and start packing.

For we had plans in the evening. Ron Kauk's HD film, Return to Balance: a Climber's Journey, was appearing at Yosemite Village, with Kauk as the emcee. Earlier in the week it had taken no particular arm twisting for Em to persuade the parents that it would be a good way to wrap up the week.

Apart from that, and one more hike, plans now began to devolve to the primary question of finding a bear. The previous day, Em had spoken to a hiking couple who had been on all the trails we had been on and had seen four bears, while we were batting zero, apart from nearby camp racket and a few scat piles. Going up Glacier Point Road and hiking there seemed promising. If that failed, walking to the film and back at dusk, via the back trail from Housekeeping Camp to Yosemite Village, seemed like it might meet the bear quota.

I skipped the boots and opted for sneakers, hoping that this would keep Dr. Morton's disagreeable toe under control. This had some limitations. The absence of lugged soles underfoot meant no big rock scrambles and no getting anywhere close to the edge of anything, but half a loaf is better than none.

Last Hike: Taft Point and Sentinel Dome

So off again down 41 and up the Glacier Point Road. For once we seemed to be ahead of the pack--we even beat the tour buses out of the Valley. This made parking easy. Since we'd already chosen Taft as our first destination, we were off quickly.

The trail begins in yet another burnt-over, partially grown-in piece of woods: perfect bear country, but no poop and no bears. Since the parking lot is slightly higher than the point, the walking was chiefly downhill. Bears? No bears. When we got into the grown-in woods again, no bears, but a small herd of deer clearly not on the Park payroll. They continued feeding, but also watched the humans carefully and kept their distance.

Em had been developing a theme all week, that in Yosemite there must be mountain bears and valley bears who didn't get along. She suggested that the mountain bears scorned the valley bears who didn't know how to tear up a log and eat grubs and ants. The valley bears would laugh at the mountain bears, who didn't know what a cooler looked like and couldn't rip a car apart in five minutes. Possibly, we agreed, there are also mountain and valley deer.

Before one reaches Taft Point, it's necessary to pass a feature called The Fissures. We had done our homework, so when we came out of the woods and onto the rocks, we were looking out for The Fissures.

Just as well. The Fissures are just what they sound like: narrow separations in the rock, that go down, and down, and down....


This is no place for tourists who expect to be nannied. The only place with any sort of protection is on Taft Point itself, where there's a very modest guardrail. The following shows almost all of it.



One wants to be alert because, having passed one fissure, the next will appear almost (we hope) before you know it. If you miss, well, it's been said, at one step you're 7500 feet above sea level, and at the next, 4000 feet above sea level. This fall is, as the link says, squish-you-like-a-bug fatal.

With a view like this, there was no one objecting to the photo break, except Mom, who didn't altogether trust that silly little steel railing. Neither did Em, entirely. As she leaned out from it for the shot above, she said "this is where I scare myself."

And still no hint of bear. Apart from the rock squirrels and the deer, the only non-human signs we saw were horse or mule droppings and hoofprints. A mounted ranger patrolling this piece of the Pohono Trail: talk about a job! I'm sure the shovel-toting ranger we'd seen Wednesday would rather have been mounted.


We returned to the trailhead, still in hopes of seeing a bear, and arrived still out of luck. The guidebooks say that Sentinel Dome is a more popular hike than Taft point, which turned out to be true. We were looking for under an hour out and the same back, but that didn't allow for a fairly brisk hiker traffic that slowed nearly everyone up a bit.

From a trailhead whose altitude pushed 8000 feet, Sentinel Dome (8122 ft.) is a much less intimidating prospect than it is from the Valley: it rises pretty much straight up until the immediate vicinity of the summit dome. This trail is flat and fairly comfortable until it reaches the final approach to the Dome. This is another of several places in Yosemite where the Park Service put down asphalt once upon a time. They are letting nature have its way with the hardtop now, and apparently won't be replacing it. Between the summit rocks and the uneven asphalt surface, the going isn't difficult, but it is hot.

Mr. Slippery Sneakers drew the duty of tending the backpacks whilst the female family units continued to the top of the Dome, another couple of hundred metres.


I may have got the better of the two deals. Em reported that nothing remains now of the ancient Jeffrey pine at the top of the Dome, made famous in an Ansel Adams photo about 1940. The tree died over 30 years ago and finally fell in 2003.

This is another place where people who want to keep their kids need to keep hold of them. Apart from the surprise fissures at Taft Point, that summit is fairly flat, and the danger is obvious. Below the top of Sentinel Dome, the rocks and gravelly soil slope gradually toward the edge of the abyss, which also has no guardrail. I tried the slope, below, a little in my sneakers and quickly backed up: very slippery.

The conversation with other hikers was good, but the eavesdropping was better. Consider this tidbit that passed between two women coming up from Glacier Point:

a: I hope we won't be too late to start dinner.

b: Don't worry; I have a roast in my trunk.

Something made me think this person would be hearing from the bears very, very soon.

Finally Waltzing with Bears

We got back to trailhead soon after 1 p.m. and headed back to Housekeeping Camp. After the breeze at the top, the valley seemed especially hot, so we didn't get much done in the packing department: in fact we napped by turns until it was time to fix supper.

Everyone had a flashlight when we started out for Yosemite Village soon after six. The plan was to walk back again if there was enough light left after the film, and otherwise to take the shuttle. You might say this was putting everything on one throw in the bear sighting department.

There were no bears en route to the village, apart from yours truly. Once we reached the bike path, my wife decided the best place to be was on the left side of the path, leaving the rest of us centre-right. I was still a bit raw from the previous day's experience with pedestrians on the bike path and raised an objection. I was voted down, so I dropped back a few feet to give any oncoming bike traffic a fighting chance. After we got past the deer-watching crowd, a camper on his own mountain bike came smoking down the path and dodged around my determined spouse, missing her by inches. As soon as he was past, our traffic safety expert leaped to the right side of the path. I said nothing, but I suppose said it eloquently.

I recommend the film, for its insights as well as its heart-stopping videography. Some of the free-climbing was on cliffs and boulders at low heights, Kauk said. This was apparent in some shots, but not in others. Em commented that even though he was being self-deprecating, Kauk's free climbing technique was at an off-the-charts degree of difficulty, whether he was 10 inches off the ground or 1000 feet.

Some time in the past, I recall learning that Islamic muezzins use a simple test to determine the difference between day and night: whether they can distinguish a black thread from a white. My wife has long subscribed to something similar. When we left the theatre under the faintest remaining hint of twilight, I was not surprised to hear her decree that there was enough light to walk back to Housekeeping Camp. So, off we went to locate the start of the trail in the "daylight."

We found it, turned left, and started. We had no sooner done so than another trail user came in from the parking lot less than ten metres ahead of us. This user was dark, furry and quadrupedal. We had our bear at last, although not quite under the conditions we wanted. It stopped. We stopped, shining our lights on the bear. (Note: it takes much longer to tell this than it took to happen.)

According to the NPS playbook, when a party on foot is surprised by a bear at short range, they should bunch together, shout loudly, wave their arms and flashlights and in general try their best to look like Bigfoot and scare the bear off.

Did that happen? It did not.

Em was in the lead. She said "bear" a nanosecond before me. (My wife has no night vision whatsoever, so it was fortunate she was not in her usual leading position: she would have walked right into it.) With our next breath, we said "bus" in unison, executed a smart about face, and retreated to catch the shuttle. The bear was still standing there and watching until we turned the corner, when I thought I saw it slowly move away. We mentioned this to the next couple we saw, who shrugged and said they were going to the parking lot, not the path. Considering the direction the bear came from, that parking lot is the last place I wanted to be, in a group of less than 30.

It was, I think, about 200 pounds: that is, noticeably larger than a very large Newfie, although much bulkier. It didn't make any aggressive gestures or noise, but seemed to be waiting to see just what it was up against. Em's size estimate was about the same. Mme No Nightvision couldn't contribute to the discussion. Em had also seen that the bear had the ear tag showing it to be one of the Park's Bad Attitude bears: not necessarily dangerous to humans, but an outlaw.

What was interesting, at least to my daughter, was that she and I felt interest, not fear. I've been there before--not necessarily with big animals with sharp pointy teeth, but in dangerous situations. Very often, there simply isn't time to be afraid. One goes from discovery of the situation to response. In this case, we weren't feeling any fear even in reaction. My spouse sort of um-hummed to this conversation, so we can but assume she agreed. We shuttled back to Housekeeping Camp and walked to our unit talking loudly and playing our lights around. There was some packing preparation to do before leaving in the morning, which we did and then settled in: with an oversight.

Em had brought a very large citronella candle, which we had been using for the past couple of nights rather than fuss with the gas lantern. This thing sat in a flared tin and had a plastic cover on it. It didn't seem to be a particular critter magnet, so we gave it little attention.

In the morning, we found the tin just outside our enclosure, empty. The lid was neatly sliced in one place and sat next to the tin. The candle, which probably weighed a couple of pounds, was gone.

As we packed, my spouse kept coming back to the candle. There were no footprints in the dust outside the enclosure (not even ours). There was no other sign of disturbance. We'd been shooing ravens away all week. Therefore, it must have been a raven. At first I went along with this explanation whole-heartedly, until I considered how much the candle weighed. I kept my reservations to myself, because I didn't think it wise to tax my wife with the likely presence of a bear within a couple of metres of her as she slept.

So yeah, it was a raven: just a damn big one.


------------------------------------------------------------
* No two sources agree exactly on the mileage of these trails: this is an average. One problem is that you can reach both from Glacier Point, and also from a service road just short of the Glacier Road parking lot, near Washburn Point. Parking is now discouraged at the service road, but hikers can get at the road from Washburn Point. Why bother? The joint trailhead comes before the traffic at Glacier Point and is nearly midway between the two destinations.