We're going on a bear hunt...

...we're not scared!

The day started badly, when once again we got sucked into the "$99 Activity Card for free, a breakfast meeting and brief update on what's new at your timeshare" - will we never learn? It doesn't do a whit of good stating right up front that you're all out of spare cash but are prepared to listen to what they have to tell you and then you're out of there. Oh no - the pressure steps up steadily and insistently, they keep bringing new players in to bat and if you run screaming for the door you get stuck with the $198 charge for the Activity Card that you've barely used. Our meeting wound up with an extraordinarily rude young man (Director of Investor Relations?) practically lying on the floor and throwing a tantrum when we repeated that we would not be deciding then and there to invest another few thousand dollars. Aaaaaarrrrrrrgh.

Returned fuming to our unit via the golf course to see about hiring clubs and thrashing our anger out on some poor, unsuspecting golf balls, but decided there were better things to do and see round here. That's when the day started to improve. We grabbed a quick bite and headed back out to Skyline Drive.

As suggested by the first salesman in our morning endurance test, a pretty decent guy, we took the route North towards Big Meadows (the one good thing that came out of that meeting). He had told us we'd see plenty of deer and might catch a glimpse of a Black Bear up there.

The trees driving north had shed far more of their leaves than the drive south, which we took yesterday - it's higher, but it may also have been an effect of the rain last night. Either way, it was pretty and the colours looking out over the valley were wonderful. Big Meadows is an open area, once used for grazing and maybe for growing crops - should know, as we went round the exhibits in the Visitors Centre, mainly telling the story of how the Park was set up. An interesting initiative, which gave work during the Depression to many "boys" who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, set up by President Roosevelt (worth looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps). It also involved trouble and heartbreak for some of the farmers and others who lived there prior to the Park's inauguration. One man, who had a 46 acre farm and a successful business selling home-cured ham sandwiches etc fought relocation for 6 or 7 years, but was eventually dispossessed.

Not very hopefully, we asked the rangers at the desk about the possibility of seeing a bear - and rather to our surprise, they gave us a couple of locations where we'd have a reasonable chance - one being the stretch from there to the next overlook. They also reminded us to look up in the trees, not just on the ground, as the bears go up them to get acorns.

After stopping to snap some deer, we drove as slowly as possible along the next stretch, my eyes swivelling like Mad Eye Moody's to scan for bears while keeping the car on the road and checking for traffic in both directions. And there was the first bear! We stopped, snapped endlessly, mostly getting pictures of his backside or an anonymous shiny black blob, until he wandered even out of zoom range. On to the next place - except that we decided to cut back the same way first - and there was another, slightly larger bear (or was it the first one, 50 yards further to the right)? Several other cars drew up over the 20 minutes we watched him, with mobiles, small cams and fancy cameras with decent telephoto lenses all snapping away.

One more time in each direction - this time the bear shinned up a tree, so I , followed by a much younger man, shinned up the very steep bank to try and get a shot of him at the top of a tree that looked totally incapable of supporting his weight. Neither he nor the tree co-operated to our satisfaction (he kept the leaves and branches between him and us), and when he started to shin down again, knowing just how fast he had gone up, we matched his speed slithering back down the bank. We were far too close for comfort, even though he didn't want to be anywhere near us either. The shot I got before fleeing is a streaky blur of trees and bear - rather effective, think I won't delete it.

Back to the unit feeling calm and full of satisfaction. Maybe we'll go on another bear hunt tomorrow.