A bear wandered into the open garage while I was outside working on some wiring on the front porch. I would not have known he was there except that a woman stopped her car in front of the house a minute or so later to take pictures.
He found a little paper bag of trash that I was collecting while I was working – it had a food wrapper in it along with some wiring scrap. I had to shoo him off twice before he finally gave up and left for good.
Darlene and I spent a couple weeks in late June and early July at the Tahoe house taking care of a bunch of house maintenance, including roof repair, clearing newly fallen branches and pine needles, moving the bear box to accommodate a widening of the driveway, etc. We took some time off from all that to go climb to the top of a very windy Mt. Rose (elev. 10,785 ft.), do some mountain biking and hike up the Five Lakes trail near Palisades/Alpine Meadows.
We also had another bear visitor while up working on the roof:
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Darlene and I loaded up the van and the cats and headed out this past week for a short adventure. First stop was to overnight under some dark skies in the San Benito mountains for a potential meteor storm from Tau Herculids. (There was a decent meteor shower, but no full-on storm.) We then spent the next five days in and around Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park, hiking among the magnificent giant sequoia trees, checking out Kings Canyon and exploring the Sequoia National Forest between the two national parks. We also attempted an extended mountain bike ride from Buck Rock to Lookout Peak but had to abort due to a failure / total destruction of my rear hub – resulting in a long bike walk back.
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The noise you hear is a snow plow operating nearby, probably clearing the road intersection off-camera to the left. An hour later, apparently while I was editing the original video clip of his dash across the road, the bear came back – with the snow plow still operating nearby — and he tried crossing again several times. (I’ve now combined all the clips together.)
Well, not really so unexpected – turkeys and baby deer in Santa Cruz…
And another bear in North Tahoe…
And now, in August, a mama bear and her cub:
We had a big bear visit the Tahoe house a few days ago – for size comparison, that bear box holds two full size trash cans and then some:
Update: And another couple of visitors in September:
We came across a bear near the Tahoe house today – inspecting a neighbor’s “bear box”:
I noticed a curious thing on the Tahoe house front camera after a recent snowfall: first a pristine layer of snow across the driveway and then, a little later, a set of tracks across the driveway and *directly* under the camera….. but no recording of the creature that left them. This camera triggers a recording every time a passing car’s headlights even just illuminates the driveway and yet… no recording of the mysterious creature. Spooky!
Now given the size and shape of the footprints, and how they lead under the front porch, there can be only one conclusion: it was a visit by the ghost bear!!