There’s Nothing Fishy About These Campsite Boo-Boos

I called Rick Rockel this week to get a fish report for the Bridgeport area and the manager of Ken’s Sporting Goods gave me a bear report instead.

Seems that a few hours earlier, a woman carrying groceries from her car to her cabin came out for more bags and was startled to find a large bruin inside the vehicle eating her food.

“The bear was sitting in the front seat, wearing a pair of [sun-glasses] and munching away on chips or something,” Rockel said. “No, he didn’t have a Corona in his other hand.”

Nor was the bear really sporting shades, it turned out. “But he was inside the car,” Rockel maintained, explaining that he was joking merely to point out that most people coming up to the mountains have misconceptions about black bears and are taking a potentially dangerous situation too lightly.

“This kind of thing has been happening all summer, but now the bears are getting bolder,” Rockel continued. “They’re not only knocking over trash cans, they’re breaking into cabins with people still inside them--in broad daylight!”

Ron Thomas, a Department of Fish and Game biologist in charge of monitoring bear activity in Mono County, was asked if more bears are coming in contact with humans this season.

“Every year I say to myself that this is the busiest season we’ve had on bears. . . . I don’t really keep records, but I guess it’s always busy,” he said.

Thomas said a sow recently had to be destroyed after repeated visits to a ranch in the town of Walker, where it had been killing chickens to get to their eggs. Thomas hadn’t heard about the bear climbing into the woman’s car, but wasn’t surprised by the news and said there have been fairly widespread reports of bears breaking into cabins.

In Annett’s Mono Village, a trout fisherman’s paradise tucked beneath towering, snow-capped peaks on the shore of Upper Twin Lake near Bridgeport, owner Norm Annett said he has had to “do some trash-can restructuring” throughout the 300-campsite facility to make it more bear-proof because of the animals wandering out of the wilderness to dine on discarded table scraps.

He said visiting bears are nothing new, nor are they particularly bothersome to tourists, mostly just knocking over ice chests and poking their noses into trash cans before moving on. But he acknowledged that the potential for danger does exist and said he tries to persuade campers to store their food properly and avoid feeding the animals. “But sometimes it’s like talking to a brick wall.”

Serious back-country campers know enough to store their food in air-tight containers and hang it from trees out of the reach of bears, but most day or weekend visitors to wilderness areas closer to civilization aren’t doing enough to dissuade the bruins. Food isn’t being stored properly. Half-empty plates are merely tossed in trash cans or dumpsters.

The bears merely follow their noses, which can smell bacon frying a mile away.

Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks have bear-proofed dumpsters and added bear-proof lockers, and Mammoth Lakes is in the process of installing bear-proof dumpsters in an attempt to keep bears from wandering through town.

But the bears have simply moved on to the surrounding campgrounds. The U.S. Forest Service has responded by trying to muster funds to provide the bear-proof lockers. There aren’t enough funds, of course.

“At least in Mammoth an awareness to the problem is developing, as it did in Yosemite,” Thomas said, stressing that it’s more of a people problem than a bear problem, although it is the bears that sometimes have to pay with their lives.

“The most recurrent and troubling thing I see is people intentionally feeding the bears, leaving food out for them,” he explained. “They think they’re doing the bears a favor but in many cases they’re signing that bear’s death warrant.”

Throughout the Eastern Sierra, Thomas said, bears that become too habituated to humans are destroyed, not relocated, because “there is no place to move a bear anymore. If we take a problem bear and put it someplace else, chances are it’s going to have to compete with other bears who have already staked out their territory, and then it’s going to become desperate [for food] and wander back down out of the woods and really become a problem.”

During a recent police fishing derby/scholarship fund-raiser at Twin Lakes just above Mammoth, law enforcement personnel from throughout California were invited. Some of them left shaking their heads in disbelief.

“All the cops . . . couldn’t get over how we’ve got giant bears walking by the campsites,” Mammoth Lakes Police Chief Mike Donnelly told the Mammoth Times. “The crowds were following the bears. People were throwing food at the bears and snapping pictures. It’s just absurd. Somebody’s going to get hurt.”

Below Mammoth and high above the town of Bishop in the upper Bishop Creek drainage area, three or four bears have been lumbering in and out of campgrounds almost every afternoon or evening, licking paper plates and cups and turning over unattended ice chests before venturing back into the wilderness.

Gary Olson, who owns Bishop Creek Lodge and Parcher’s Lodge near South Lake, said the bears haven’t been too much of a disruption and don’t seem to be much of a threat. He did cite, however, the time a large group rented six of his cabins and left one of the doors open one evening.

“They had all gathered by the fire and wanted to make Smores [with roasted marshmallows and graham crackers],” Olson recalled. “Well, they forgot the graham crackers, so one of the guys went back to the cabin and found a bear inside eating all the graham crackers. They were both startled. He ran out first, and then the bear ran out.”

Thomas doesn’t like hearing such stories because he fears that one day the ending won’t be so happy.

“A lot of people don’t realize it, but these animals are incredibly strong,” he said. “I’ve seen them run right through cabin walls and keep on going. . . . And when they’re feeding, they don’t have the same rules we do. I mean, a kid standing there with a candy bar the bear wants is going to get hurt.”

TUNA AND ‘TAILS

Albacore are back in pretty big numbers despite predictions by some that the season was over. The Pacific Queen on Wednesday morning returned from a 1 1/2-day trip to Fisherman’s Landing with 140 longfins for 30 passengers. “And it was all that 20- to 40-pound stuff,” boasted Tim Thurman, a spokesman for the landing.

Not bad, but the San Diego landings have a lot more to brag about this week. Not only are there albacore about 90 miles out, there are bluefin tuna, dorado and an occasional school of 50- to 100-pound bigeye tuna.

A little closer in, anglers aboard the one-day boats have their hands full with football-sized yellowfin tuna, yellowtail and dorado. Private boaters have had run-ins with these fish as close as 30 miles out.

CABO BLUES

The reels are doing the singing off Land’s End as blue marlin have arrived on schedule, en masse, just in time for the upcoming tournaments. Gaviota Fleet representative Larry Edwards of Cortez Yacht Charters in Lemon Grove calls it “perhaps the best blue marlin fishing of the decade.”

In any case, it’s pretty good, with some boats returning to port flying two or three blue marlin flags. Top catch, a 625-pound blue by a Colorado angler after a 3 1/2-hour fight aboard Edith III. Besides, blues, there are a lot of sailfish in the area. A Texas angler landed a 180-pounder, which is huge by sailfish standards.

WHEN FROGS FLY

When a hurricane comes to town, that’s when. According to the Charlotte Observer, motorists north of Wilmington, N.C., were warned to watch out for the flying amphibians because Hurricane Bonnie’s winds were knocking down trees, prompting the frogs to jump, whereupon they “were picked up by strong gusts of wind and sent dozens of feet into the air” and across the highway.

EARLY DAMAGE ESTIMATES

The Boat Owners Assn. of the United States estimates that Hurricane Bonnie’s 10-foot tidal surge has caused about $15 million in damage to recreational boats along the coast of North Carolina. Still, that is fairly moderate considering the severity of he hurricane. The group credits advance warning and accurate forecasting for helping to keep the damage minimized.

WATER ON THE BRAIN

Also in the Charlotte Observer was a story about two surfers who briefly contemplated paddling out into 12- to 15-feet storm surf generated by Bonnie.

“Police Sgt. Joey Culpepper pulled up in his squad car and told them to leave or else face a $50 fine for violating the 24-hour curfew,” the newspaper reported. “They can’t sleep as long as there are waves,” the policeman reasoned. “They’d like to be out there right now. But they’re not that stupid.”

Don’t bet on it.

* FISH REPORT, C14