Bear tale, long read

didn’t want to hijack the other bear’s demise thread, NBD’s comment evoked a memory from 45+ years ago.

We were hunting the Wyoming late elk hunt Nov 1-14, a migration hunt, we usually packed in about 16 miles, but the snow that year was deep, so we decided to encamp at the Turpin meadows trailhead as we knew with the heavy snowfall, the elk would come pouring out the the Yellowstone, Soda Fork and Thorofare country enmass.

We left camp to hunt a drainage just up the trail called Clear creek, it was a very large and steep north-South running canyon that the elk usually didn’t cross but paralleled.
I got off my horse and proceeded up the canyon edge, my two hunting partners took my horse and proceeded to head westerly a couple miles to a big ridge to cut tracks. We met a couple miles up the canyon and had lunch and discussed what we hadn’t seen.

We got back in the saddle and rode back down my tracks for about a mile, when a set of fairly large and damn sure fresh grizzly tracks came from the west and intersected my tracks in the snow, my pardners had evidently bumped him, but they or the horses never saw him. he stomped around a few steps and then turned back down my tracks, we took off on his tracks at a steady pace and when we evidently got too close to him, he bailed off into the canyon. When we reached his bail off point, we could see him scaling the other side and into a pocket of lodge pole and fir from which he never emerged.
We decided to call it a day and went back to a camp of hot food, gin rummy and some libations.

Got another big dump of snow during the night.

Next day we proceeded up the East rim of Clear Creek doing nearly same except for my pardner Bimbo went with me and his Dad Harold rode farther east, we met around 10 or 11, and Harold said he thought he had seen an elk coming through the snow covered timber and stopped and it became a grizzly when come into better view . Bimbo and I laughed because we hadn’t cut his tracks out of the canyon, so he must’ve crawled out and holed up for the night between where we had seen him last and when Harold saw him.

Well Bimbo and I being what we were and much to Harold’s dismay, he called us damn fools, we decided to go take his track and see where he was headed.

We cut his tracks and took him across the north fork trail and across what’s called middle mountain, as we followed the tracks to where they intersected the Southfork trail, there was a young packer hauling grain and hay into a upper camp at Pendergraf meadows and he was gathering up a snorting and blowing pack string with hay and grain scattered from hell to breakfast. We had run that bear right through the pack string. We never let on we was chasing that bear.

He had everything caught and just needed to repack what was salvageable. So We rode off like nothing was going on and then slipped back in below him and took the track again. We pushed that bear to the Buffalo river and from where he went in, to where he came out, you could have stretched a string line and it would not have varied but a few degrees, we laughed and would have really liked have gotten to watch him bounding across the river. He had enough of being pursued and was leaving the country.

We then went back to elk hunting, but that night at camp, Harold give us a Scotch blessing and reminded us we were elk hunting not grizzly.

Over the course of the next week or so, that Packer was the talk of the trailhead about the grizz parting his pack string, of course Bimbo and I just listened and nodded our heads, all the while trying not to bust a gut laughing, because we knew there was more to the story.

We ended up filling all our tags without cutting anymore grizzly sign, can’t do that now, because one, that hunt no longer exists, and two that area is polluted with Grizzlies, and on Sept 18, 2018 a guy I knew was fatally mauled on Cub creek a few miles east of where this story took place.

Harold and Bimbo are both gone now, but I think of shenanigans that Bimbo and I pulled in those mountains and if Harold had known half of it, he would have peeled a strip off both of us even though we was grown.

Hope you enjoyed this, because just like Elmer Kieth, Hell, I was there.

Mule