A Bear Encounter

A lifetime ago when I was flying the Athabasca Fire-watch Tower ridge just North West of Hinton, I “sank out” and landed at the bottom of the ridge without soaring much. It takes a knack to be able to catch the rising air currents consistently. Much of the motivation to learn how to stay in the air comes from just such a short “sled ride” on a hang glider to the bottom of the hill. My buddy Dainas Madness named this landing field Klaus-Base seeing as I was a frequent visitor, while everyone else was going to cloud base.

It was a nice sunny day with cumis (cumulus clouds) popping up and ravens soaring. The 1300 ft climb up the face of the ridge to retrieve my vehicle was more disappointing than daunting. I smoked a joint of some good Afghani “freedom fighters” hash, the gold star stuff and started out with my flying “errors” on my mind. Soon I was moving quickly through the alder brush and dense thicket at the bottom of the slope. The mosquitoes were thick and hungry.

In about 40 minutes I was only a hundred or so feet under the rocky cliff along the very top of the ridge. The spine I climbed was very steep and mostly free of alders at this point. An old overgrown exploration switch back wound its way up the face here. The intermittent breeze cooled me while reminding me how good the lift that I had missed was. I was lost in thought about soaring, when a sudden noise above, where the switch back crossed again, made me look up.

The sight I beheld made me freeze.