Summer of the Seven Bears

I have been blessed to have the opportunity to visit Yellowstone National Park on five or six occasions in my lifetime. As anyone who has been there can attest, it is some of God's favorite country. The wild life that can be seen is one of the chief attractions of the park.

In past visits I have seen bison, elk, various squirrels and chipmunks, porcupine, and wolves. But I had never seen a bear. This time I saw SEVEN!!!

The first two were a Mother Grizzly and her cub. They were about a mile off, down in a meadow. They could only really be seen with binoculars. This photo was taken with the digital camera through the binoculars (Sharon is very resourceful).

The next one was a black bear that cross the road ten feet in front of us. Wow! Amazing!

Sharon had seen the bear off the road a bit and had me turn around. We searched but with no luck. We were starting on our way again when Sharon saw the bear again. I stopped the car and turned on my hazard lights when we realized the black bear was going to cross the road right in front of us! What was crazy is this mini-van comes up the lane opposite of us. I waive my hands wildly to have them stop, mostly to protect the bear in case it dashed, but also that the family could see this once in lifetime event. But noooo... this mini-van wasn't going to be detoured by the crazy guy in the blue Sable. So they blew by and missed an opportunity to be a few feet from a wild bear.

Further down the same road we saw another black bear some 50 feet off in the woods.

On our last day, driving through the park on our way home, we had our most spectacular bear sighting. About ten cars were pulled to the side of the road, so we play lemming and pull over too. We join the dozen or so visitors and lo, there was a Mother Grizzly and two cubs! They were about 50 feet off in a clearing. The Mom was mouzin' about while the two cubs were running and playing. Just amazing! We must have stood there watching for 15 minutes before the bears had moved on.

How amazing! How cool! How blessed!