Field Program

Our seventh hitch was our first hitch partnered with the National Park Service. This was exciting because multiple people on our crew have long-term career goals centered around the NPS. Our project partner, Marten, was fantastic. He spent a lot of time with us and gave us a lot of helpful feedback.

One of the most notable experiences on this hitch was that we had our first grizzly encounter. For the previous hitch, we had been constantly warned about grizzly bears, and even had been provided a bear fence for our campsite, but only one crew member saw one bear from a distance. On this hitch, there was no bear fence or special warning, but we finally saw one up close in the wild.

The first sign of bears was when we got to our tool cache one morning and the tarp had been slashed by bear claws. We had also seen a lot of fresh bear scat on the trail and near our cache. The most surprising part was that the bear had bitten into the bar oil container. Marten said he had never seen that before!

The second instance was an actual encounter. Luckily, our entire group was together when we stumbled upon a grizzly bear hanging out in the creek. We had been yelling the “Hey Bear!” call, but it had not scared off the bear. The bear stopped and looked at us all. We were not far away from it at all. Then, it jumped out of the creek and started to run away from us. It would still pause every so often as it was going away to look over its shoulder at us. It seemed curious.

The third instance was on our last day when myself and one of my crew leads were on a side quest to retrieve a lost katana from a previous worksite. We believe it was the same bear in the same area. It was on the trail just ahead of us. When it saw us, it stood up on its hind legs and stared at us. We were getting nervous and had our bear spray ready, but after it got a good look at us, it went back to all fours and started to trot away from us.

It was so cool to finally see a grizzly bear in the wild!