Date: 2011-03-22
From: Bull Gap

To: Low Gap Shelter
Miles today: 9.8
Weather: broken clouds

THE BEAR STORY, Around 2:30 am, I was awakened by yelling, headlamps flashing across my tent and things crashing and running through the woods. Then I heard the explanation for all the racket.    "Bear" someone yelled. As I climbed out of the tent, Speakeasy explained that a bear had stolen Redstripe's and Chris's food bags and they were in hot pursuit. Fortis's bag was also knocked down but was ignored by the bear. It was a good thing because it contained his insulin and would have been tough to replace quickly.    After a few minutes, Redstripe and Chris showed back up with their food bags. Chris had lost a little food, but mostly their stuff was just covered in bear slobber. after they had chased him quite a ways, he finally just dropped the bags.    After things had just quieted down for 20 minutes or so, I decided to go back to sleep. I figured everyone else was "bearanoid" enough they would be up all night and no bear would want anything to do with our camp. I hadn't been asleep 5 minutes when someone yelled, "Cog, bears got your food". I jumped out of my tent. This was a different matter entirely; it was MY food. As I run down the hill, I see everyone standing around with their headlamps on the bear, trying to take pictures of the bear as he eats my food.    I start yelling at the bear, trying to get him to get his nose out of my food bag, but he just blows me off and keeps eating.    All of a sudden Fortis says, "I got an M-80. Want me to throw it at him?"      "Hell yeah, I want you to throw it at him" was my reply. Fortis lights it, throws it and with one lucky bounce, it ends up literally just a couple of feet from the bear. The sparks from the fuse caught the bear's attention and he stopped eating for about a 1/2 a second to look at it. Then stuck his snout back in my food bag and was chowing down when "BANG", the M-80 went off. The bear jumped straight up in the air and took off. Apparently, he really likes hiker food, though, because he only went about 20 yards or so. But it was enough for me to recover my mangled bag and what was left of my food.    Now we were really all on edge. We caught the bear patrolling the fringes of our camp a couple times in the next hour or so and ended up staying up the rest of the night.   In the morning, as we all inventoried our food, I found my cup was missing. It had been in my food bag. I looked around and couldn't find it where the bear was last night. I had enough breakfast and dinner to make it into Hiawassee, but no lunches or snacks at all. Everyone else had enough food to continue on. We took one last look for my cup and finally found it quite a ways from where we took the food from the bear. Loaded up my pack and hiked back to Neels Gap to resupply while the others hiked on.   I got to Neels Gap around 10am just as the first burgers were hitting the grill. after a quick resupply and reporting the bear incident inside the store, I plopped down at a picnic table and inhaled two of those fantastic burgers. I loaded a water bottle with sweet tea and left, feeling like that bear had done me a favor.   Powered by the burgers, I decided I might as well hike the 11 miles to Low Gap shelter where the rest of the folks from last night were headed. I went to refill water at Hogpen Gap and found a baby wipe at the spring and toilet paper behind a tree 10 feet downstream. Ended up hiking the last 3 miles hot, thirsty and pissed off.   Finally arrived in camp around 7pm much to everyone's surprise. Set up my tent, got some water, ate a pepperoni and crashed, too tired to cook. Redstripe, Fortis, Speakeasy, Chris, Mickey from Mass and Taz and Roo here. Tree falling woke us up looking for bears. Bear story spreading fast.