Settling In and...Black Bears!

We spent the morning settling in and then made a 20 mile trip to the closest grocery, in Crescent CA. The entire trip is on Highway 101, which 'hugs' the coastline and also runs through a portion of the Redwood National Forest and Park. The drive is just awe-inspiring. We've never seen anything like it. The redwood trees were huge...absolutely huge, 100+ feet tall and the trunks huge.

The highway has been carefully carved thru the Redwood Forest to reduce impacts to the forest. There's a section you drive through where the redwoods form a 'steeple' over the road, covering it entirely, and it's breathtakingly beautiful. Once thru the forest, the highway hugs the Pacific ocean the rest of the way. So we really enjoyed the drive into town today. We can't pick up any cell service while in camp, so we made a couple of phone calls while in town, bought our groceries and headed back home.

Then it happened!!! We had just entered the Redwood Forest section of the highway and when we rounded the bend, a Big "Black Bear" walked right out in front of us on the Road!! It was huge! Mark hit's the breaks as the bear walked right onto the highway in front of the truck...the bear never neven looked at us as he strolled into the middle of the road. The bear saw a car approaching from the other side of the road, stopped midway on the road, stood up (he was 6 foot tall) then turned around...dropped down on all fours and trotted right back off the road into the forest, on our side of the road. It was such an awesome experience! We were both speechless at first. I couldn't believe it.

We had been warned about Elk and avoiding them, as well as raccoons getting into trash...but we were unaware that bears were in the area. I guess since it's so near the coast, it just never dawned on me we were in 'bear country', so to speak. That's the closest we've ever been or will probably ever be to a wild bear. And I felt honored to have been in his company, if that makes sense. Of course, the thought of facing that thing in the wild would be terrifying. Afterwards, we drove on and just a couple of blocks up the road were several folks with their cameras taking pictures into the forest, and their cars were no where near them--and to think that bear was just around the corner from them...yikes!

We plan on checking out the sights in the area, including the Redwood Forest in the next few days, but you can bet we'll be cautious about where we go! No pictures yet, we were too busy today but we'll get some pictures of our river location as well as our other 'outings' and post in the coming days. So...stay tuned!