Mama Bear Visits

My brother didn’t fully secure the bear-proof trash bin cabinet while staying at the Tahoe house recently and a mama bear and her cubs managed to get into it. That wasn’t caught on video since their truck was blocking the camera, but you can see mama try the door to the truck before moving on. She was back again a couple of days later to see if anything more was to be found.  Secure your trash!

Bear in the Garage

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.

Tahoe Summer Days

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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Among the Giant Sequoias

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.

We came across some black bears while hiking in Sequoia National Park.

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High Speed Bear Crossing

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.)