Mike in the Wild

I awoke to the sound of breaking glass coming from outside my bedroom window.   Even though it was 12:30 AM, I grabbed a flashlight and headed outside in the direction of the noise, towards my neighbors' house.  I knew they were out of town, and I would have wanted them to similarly keep an eye on my place while I traveled.  When I reached the end of my driveway, I could see a pair of bright eyes across the street reflecting the beam of my flashlight.  On a slope below where my neighbors kept their trash bins, a bear was staring directly at me.  And then it turned, climbed up the slope, and sauntered away down the street.   Just a few weeks later, I would have an entirely different bear story that occurred very much closer -  not a hundred feet away but a mere six feet from my front door.  My summer had begun several weeks earlier with lots of bear sightings in my Prescott neighborhood.  There were stories of a big one that kept get...

The tragic headlines recounting a local person's death by bear attack did not deter me from heading up the Dandrea Trail to where, five years ago, I had seen my one and only wild bear in Arizona.  What did prevent me from returning to that contact spot was damage from last year's Crook's Fire which closed the trail up near the peaks, the highest in the Bradshaw Mountains.  Lucky for me on this past Monday I discovered I didn't need to venture very far and high into Prescott's forests to see my second bear; I only had to wander the trails that lead from my own neighborhood.   For a week in June, the news reports in Prescott were filled with the story of a Groom Creek resident tragically mauled to death by a black bear, apparently without any provocation.  The victim's neighbor shot the bear dead while it was consuming the dead man.  Fortunately my own encounter on the Dandrea Trail so long ago was a much less harrowing encounter.   In fact it was o...

Dandrea Trail leads to some of the highest peaks in the Bradshaw Mountains, and on a hot day in June it might be one of the coolest hikes in the Prescott area.  I first hiked this heavily forested and bird-filled trail at the very end of summer last year, so it seemed like a fitting way to start a hike early this summer season.  While I was expecting to see the rich variety of birds I saw last year, I harbored a not-so-secret wish to see a bear for the first time.  Little did I know it would be a dream come true! I was reminded just how remote the trail was when I arrived on a hot Saturday at the trailhead and saw only one other parked car.  Spotting my very first red-faced warbler just several feet into the morning hike was yet another reminder of the area's rich birding habitat.   But it was higher up the trail, just before reaching  a saddle with its crisscrossing paths to higher peaks, where I had my once-in-a-lifetime encounter. Black bears po...