MT Biker: Bear Spray

Holy $%*# Moment for Rose in Cooke City

Absarokee is known for few things, but one of them is fireworks. Like all things Absarokee, it's a Libertarian success story. There is no city here, just a bunch of individual clans and groups of miners, and each one tries to outdo the next on July 4th with the most extravagant fireworks display. The cumulative effect is that Absarokee has some of the most impressive shows I've ever seen, outdoing even most of the organized ones.

Some years we revel in it, bringing a cooler of beer to the back deck and just enjoying it.

This year, getting out of town seemed like the better call, so we headed up to Cooke City, and camped out at the juncture of Goose Lake Jeep Road and Lulu Pass.

Bam! Photobombed!!!

On the connector road between Lulu and Daisy.
This is where we watched the fireworks at Cooke,
it was cool because we were looking down onto the show.
Also, the surrounding mountains made the sound as cool as the sight.

Cooke City. Some of the best summers of my life were down there.

Rose, Yokie, Maja & Vera. I'm a lucky guy to have such great friends.

Rose in bear country

Whenever we are in bear (& moose which actually scare me more) country, we have Rose carry a little personal bear spray canister that goes on your wrist for easy access. She's been doing this for three years or so now. We make her practice drawing it and which way to point it, how to aim and fire quickly.

Obviously, with her playing in the braided creek around Lulu, surrounded by swamps and meadows, she had it with her.

On July 5th around 10:30am, she had been playing by herself for about twenty minutes, about fifty meters away from camp in the woods. Yokie turned to me and asked if we should go check on her. Since she had Kip with her, I wasn't worried she was lost or anything, so I said "In a few minutes, if anything happens, Kip will come get me."

As if on cue, Kip came running back to camp a minute later, and nudged me strongly and kind of huffed (he's not much of a barker). "That's my cue." I told Yokie and went to check on Rose.

Kip led me out, across a series of sandbars and on game trails to where he thought Rose was. She was gone. Now I was worried. We circled back to camp.

When I got there I saw Yokie and Rose leaving to come find me. I ran to them. Rose was in the midst of a full break down, streaming tears and catching her breath, sobbing.

It turns out that she was playing in a pool next to a big hedge and she saw a small black bear. The bear was on his hind legs, peering over the hedge at her and Kip. She drew her bear spray and fired into the bush at the bear, who wheeled away and she couldn't then see. She panicked, forgot the way back to camp, and asked Kip to take her. Kip took her, but she couldn't follow his route over the logs, so she circled back to find the camp.

That's pretty brave of her, circling around in the forest alone to find us, when she had just fired her spray and there was a bear around.

We went to check on the area, and didn't see any tracks or any signs, but I'm no tracker. There were game trails everywhere, and it did look like prime country for all sorts of animals. I'm not sure if it was a bear or not, but she obviously saw something that scared the bejeezus out of her. We're proud of her for doing the right thing and remembering how to act in a situation like that. Wish she would have screamed for us, but otherwise very proud.

Obviously, after that we packed up and went home.

Thanks to the makers of bear spray on that one!!