After a week of feeling really stressed out it was nice to finally find some escape. A good friend of mine, Steve Ashe, and I left early in the morning and headed to the central mountains to camp.
After a day of slowly working our way through the north-central mountains, we ended up camping at Cherry Springs for the night. It was a lonely place, only two other people in a camper were nearby. Neither of us had been to any of the places we passed through and we both enjoyed discovering what there was to see. The weather was very cloudy and the lighting flat, so I didn’t shoot a lot of photos during the day. It wasn’t until after he crashed for the night in the tent that I broke out the tripod & timer and did some self-portraits.
The most interesting part of the night was about an hour earlier when we had a surprise visitor. As we stood talking near the fire both of us heard heavy footsteps through the leaves on the ground approaching the campsite. We looked at each other, reached in our pockets and turned our mini-maglites on at the same time in the direction of the sound. See that “V” formed tree to the right in the photo? Just behind that tree was a Black Bear, Ursus americanus, that had to weigh around 350 to 400 pounds (159-182 kg)! Woo-weee that was a BIG bear! All we could see was a black shadow and glowing green/yellow eyes. I felt exhilarated having nothing between me and a large, wild carnivore but a feeble beam of light!
It took me a few seconds to think about grabbing my camera. By the time I got it out and the flash on it was GONE! Damn…