David you would enjoy the bear hunting here. Lots of cat and mouse trying to figure them out. There's two kinds of bears- The bears you would normally see glassing and this type of bear. The bears you might see out on the hillsides are the bears not tough enough to command the premium ground.
The type of bear I love to hunt lives most of his life in a small enclave in a canyon with food water and privacy. He rarely leaves his core area and sure as hell does nothing willy nilly. He is extremely deliberate, methodical, and therefor predictable, but still hard to get in on. His nose is king. Where we live by sight, they live with their nose. They smell for ripe berries and acorns while we look for them. They check whatever they want to know with their nose, while we have to hold it and look it over in our hands. This bear is alive today because he circled further downwind of his bed on the way in than I could shoot through all the dead brush and crap.
It was a tough call knowing how to set up for him. Bears feed until the sun hits them then they head for their bed, usually 9-9:30 am. I was there plenty ahead of that to keep from spooking him from his bed. The problem is the thermals change about the same time. As the canyons heat up and the air changes from going downhill all night (cooling) to uphill all day (warming). In other words, the air is swirling right about when a bear decides to approach his bedding area so he has a very good chance of getting a snout full of you. Coincidence? Nope. Nothing a bear like this does is coincidence.
Where you may come around a bend in the road and find a young bear laying in the dust in 100 degree weather for who knows what reason, a dominant bear will be in an alder thicket next to the creek staying cool. Almost as if it makes sense right? As if they..... reason.
I've read all the bear maul stories and the scariest are the deliberate man-eaters that lay traps for their prey. I have nightmares that odds are someday I will camp in the middle of that bears lair and he will pull me through the forest in my sleeping bag on the way to his dining room. When I get there it'll be littered with hiking boots and backpacks from the previous guests.
