When I was a little tyke, my fam was making a drive through Yellowstone Nat'l Park. Mom got out of the car to film a moose with her 8mm camera. One of those handheld camera's with 3 lens built onto the front of the camera that you could twist to change focal lengths. So my dad yells at my mom that she's getting a bit too close to the moose. She pay's him no mind. Looking through the lens of one of those antique camera's, everything looks much further away. Anyway Dad climbs out of the car and starts walking toward her. Finally she turns around and screams. A bear climbed into the backseat of our car and took a package of potato chips out of my hand, as both my mother and father ran screaming and hollering toward the car. The bear scurried off with my bag of chips. My sister was alone in the front seat. Neither of us were frightened, just surprised, however no one exited the car again before leaving the park.
In the mid 1950's my parents bought the Evergreen Lodge in W. Yellowstone, MT. We had a bear that would come to our back door and beg for Orange soda pop. You'd hand the bear the opened pop bottle and it'd stand on it's hind legs, guzzle down the whole soda pop, then saunter off.
In those days we had to take our own trash to the local dump. There were always bears at the dump. My most vivid recollection was an albino bear we'd see there. White as snow. My dad would make molotov cocktails to scare the bears away so we could safely empty our trash.
The good ole days...
DMc : )
LOL That bear looks and acts like one I once saw my grandma chase off the porch of her cabin with a broom and a foul mouth.
The best bear story I have ever heard though, is from before my dad was drafted and deployed to the South Pacific in WWII, he was working for a civilian contractor for the Army on the Alaska highway. They built and moved a tent town along as the highway progressed. When we used to watch M*A*S*H* on tv, he said that base looked sort of like what they were moving. There were a lot of bears he said, so their trash dump was always a few miles from camp and one of his jobs was hauling the trash out to it in a dump truck. He said they seldom got out of the truck because the dumps were always teaming with bears. This one time him and this other fellow were pulling back into base and saw several people running off. My dad and his passenger kept looking out the windows and around trying to figure out what was spooking people. They didn't figure it out till they parked the truck, and just as my dad rounded the corner behind the truck three big bears jumped out of the dump bed of the truck -- they had hauled trash to the dump and bears back to camp. He laughed when he told me that story and added, "We sure coulda used your grandma and her broom there that day".
