Re: Black Bears - Yosemite Nature Notes - Episode 26

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2015 05:03PM by plawrence.

Thank you for sharing. I have yet to see a bear in Yosemite, though I have been looking for them since my first trip. Fortunately for the bears and humans things aren't like they were back in the day.. people hand feeding bears? Crazy..

Quote
Arendi
Thank you for sharing. I have yet to see a bear in Yosemite, though I have been looking for them since my first trip.

If you want to see bears in Yosemite, for the past five or six years the easiest location to spot bears (almost on a daily basis) would be the meadows surrounding Crane Flat (near the junction of Big Oak Flat Road and Tioga Road).

Of course, black bears can be spotted throughout the park (and some bears tend to make nightly appearances at many of the Yosemite campgrounds), but the meadows surrounding Crane Flat appear to have been adopted by a family of bears as their home base and bears can often be seen there during the day.

.

Quote
Arendi
Thank you for sharing. I have yet to see a bear in Yosemite, though I have been looking for them since my first trip. Fortunately for the bears and humans things aren't like they were back in the day.. people hand feeding bears? Crazy..

We have been to Yosemite multiple times since the beginning of the year and have seen bears along Glacier Point Rd near Sentinel Dome, Tioga Road and in the valley. There is also a female with a cub in Yosemite West that have been seen often but we have not seen them but did see their scat.

A couple of years ago, we had gone up to Glacier Point to watch the sunrise. As we were walking from our car, a little ways past the "never-open" toilets, I saw a slight disturbance in the bushes immediately on the other side of the small stone wall and noticed a bear foraging there. He (she?) proceeded to pretty much walk along side us until we got closer to the snack stand. He then hopped over the small railing and worked his way down towards the first lookout area (the one that's straight ahead as you come up from the parking area...just to the left of the Pohono and Panorama TH's). He pretty much completely ignored any of us who were nearby. He was wearing a radio collar.
Have also seen bears in the woods in the general area of Curry Village. Don't recall ever seeing any in the wilderness (we have in several other NP's but not in Yosemite).

Did you ask him to pose for the classic Half Dome portrait?

Quote
chicagocwright
Did you ask him to pose for the classic Half Dome portrait?

I didn't have to...he did it on his own!

When he got to the wall at the edge of that overlook, he jumped on the wall and started to walk along it. Again, not aggressively...just going for his morning stroll. I got a couple of almost head-on shots (from a bit of a distance...just in case!) but, as I recall (I'd have to look up the picture), there was a good bit of HD in the background.

The downside of encounters like these, especially for people who are in the park for the first time or are, in general, very naive about wild animal behavior, is that it's easy to see why people get lulled into that "Disney" mindset that this is all being staged for their enjoyment and that everything's perfectly safe.

Thank you all for these great tips to spot a bear!

On Saturday July 25 three of us went to the Gardisky Lake trailhead on Saddlebag Lake road and hiked up to the lake and then turned north and went up to Tioga Crest that overlooks Saddlebag Lake to the west and Warren Canyon and Lake Canyon to the east. We hiked about a mile north along the use trail and stopped to take pictures and have lunch. While having lunch we saw an animal pop up on the crest from the west a couple hundred yards north of us. It was a little too far away to tell exactly what it was. We could only see it was very light colored like dry grass and had a black head and feet. It paused on the crest for a minute and to our surprise, headed straight down the very steep slope into Lake Canyon where Oneida Lake is. We watched in awe as it descended perhaps 1000' in just a couple of minutes. My friend pulled out his sighter scope and saw that it was a bear! I had never seen a bear with that coloring but have since determined we saw a blonde Black Bear.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2015 04:21PM by Calaveras.

Bears are still a problem in the Rock Creek area:

http://www.rockcreeklake.com/board/index.php?topic=1080.0