![[Image Description: Two MCC members taking a brief break; one is sitting on a rock, the other is standing nearby. They are both in their uniforms, looking out at the expansive, mountain view surrounding them.]](https://cdn.firespring.com/images/c3f85e97-43a9-4810-8081-e8e6338173d0.jpeg)
It was the end of a long day spent scouting for potential new beaver dams. I was paired up with someone from the local BLM office. She and I found ourselves in a flow of anticipating each other’s moves and getting the work done. However, we were both a little on edge because of a recent bear sighting. It had been a totally safe sighting; the bear had run away from us once we noticed it. Still, we were on high alert after that.
We were coming down the mountain and realized we were entering a denser area. Juniper and shrubbery started to surround us, so we were looking for a clearer path to take. The more visibility, the better. We didn’t want to be surprised by anything hiding in the vegetation around us. Carefully, we made our way through some thorns and were starting to pick up the pace again when we noticed something a little odd.
My colleague paused and asked me if I saw that black shape not far ahead of us. I slowly looked up; I had been trying to identify some berries. “Oh yeah,” I responded, “What is that?”
It looked vaguely like the outline of a bear, but it was completely still. We go back and forth for a minute before deciding on a plan.
“It’s not a bear. If it was an animal, it would not be completely still like that.”
“Well what else could it be?”
“If it’s just a shadow, what is it a shadow of?”
“Why does it look like that though?”
“Well look how it blends into the shrubs- it’s just an illusion.”
We have to keep going down at some point, so we decide to just give it a wide berth. The whole time we walk around this patch of shrubs, we are trying to spot the shadow from the other side, so we can figure out what it was we were looking at. However, we walk through this whole area and never see anything that looks like the other side of what we had been looking at from the top. At this point, we start to wonder if it had been an animal after all, and had somehow slinked away without us noticing as we walked down.
Struck with curiosity, we actually decide to walk all the way back up and see if we could still notice it from our original vantage point. Once we got back up, there it was, the eerie black shape, unmoved. I’m starting to get a weird feeling about it, but I feel safe since I’m not alone. Our next plan is that she is going to walk back down, and I am going to stay where I’m at so that I can tell her from above when she is standing at it. She moves quickly as I yell down directions.
“There! You are standing right behind it,” I yell.
She shrugs back up at me, once again not seeing any indication of what it is from that angle. After this experiment, we are ready to just give up and get out of there. We descended the mountain without any more spooky encounters, but I was left wondering what exactly we had seen that day.
