Ran into the most amazing thing Sunday. We camped at Crocker Point on sat. night, and sunday started a day hike to Taft point. On the way out, some guy was coming back towards dewey point, and he had encountered a bear that was sitting on the trail and wouldn't move. He said it wasn't aggressive, but he didn't want to test the waters, though he probably could've gone around. The only other two bears I've ever seen bolted when they saw me. We kept going and didn't see anything, but on the way back, a couple of hikers said they saw him off to the side of the trail just playing around. We ran into him about a 1/2 mile from dewey point. He was about 5 feet off the trail digging into a tree trunk. He saw us first, and his head seemed pretty big to me (he wasn't as big as he seemed, though still big enough). He just looked at us, sizing us up, and than went back to happily digging up whatever he was digging up, occasionally looking up at us with a kind of curiosity like "you're still here. These tree grubs are great". He was so close to the trail, we couldn't walk by him without seeming to walk towards him, and maybe he would take this as an act of aggression. We just waited there a few minutes and before long he stood up and we could clearly make out the ear tags. Bear #90. He didn't seem to care that we were there, and he started climbing a tree about 10 feet off the trail, and that's when we went up the trail to the other side. We stood there, and he was tearing away the bark around a hole in the tree, Very powerful. He started biting into the edges of the hole, and pulled out what looked like a large piece of honeycomb, and was licking it like a lollipop or something. He came back down the tree and laid on the ground to eat his prize, but his back was to us, so we left. Though we were so amazed at all this, in hindsight, it would seem that his lack of fear of humans could be a bad thing. Sooner or later some stupid idiot (and they're around) will do something dumb and the bear will get aggressive; in which case, though I'm sure forest officials hate it,might they have to euthanize bear #90.
