The time Chris jumped over a cliff in pursuit of a bear

Chris and I got married in April of 1997, and two weeks later, we went on a pretty awesome honeymoon - a 17-day 6700 mile (10,800 km) road trip from our home in central Missouri, to Los Angeles, then up the Pacific Coast (Highway 1/101) to Vancouver, then home again. We stopped at national parks or forests in Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon and Wyoming.

Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest in the early evening, when I was sleepily gazing out the window at the lovely views, Chris suddenly screeched to a halt and pulled over.  

"What are you doing?" I asked, feeling a bit more awake.

Chris had already unbuckled and was on his knees facing backward, grabbing for his camera in the back seat. "Bear," he muttered, and was out the door, which he didn't even bother to close, leaving it hanging open.

I watched him sprint across the road, put one hand on the guard rail, and vault over it, dropping straight down, and out of sight.  

My heart skipped a beat. Did Chris just jump off a cliff? 

Hoping I wasn't a widow after only two weeks of marriage, I got out, walked around the car and closed his door. Then I walked across the road and peered over the guard rail.   

Fortunately, the drop wasn't nearly as precipitous as it'd appeared from the car - only dropping four or five feet, then forming a steep slope that, with care, a person could pretty easily traverse. Chris - clearly in one piece - was already at the bottom of the slope, and was scurrying toward the woods.  

I watched him disappear into the woods, and waited for him to come back.  It was probably only a couple of minutes, but it felt like forever, but he emerged from the woods, and picked his way back up to me.

"Did you see the bear again?  Did you get any photos?" I asked, relieved he was safe.

"Yeah, I saw him. I took a couple. Don't know if they'll turn out." 

I shook my head, and ruefully told him how it looked like he'd jumped off a cliff, and we laughed together.

Alas, the photos didn't turn out. The bear was nothing more than a dark blur - not even recognizable as a bear. Chris was disappointed.  

We moved to New Jersey in 1999, and sometime in the early 2000s we heard there was a bear in our rural area, but we never saw it.  We moved to Minnesota in 2004, but bears tended to avoid the Minneapolis suburbs, and the only wildlife we ever saw were the stray cats, possums, and raccoons that enjoyed our compost pile. 

When we moved to northern Minnesota in 2020, we knew that bears were more common up here than near the Twin Cities, so Chris's hopes were renewed, and finally, last summer, when he was driving through the lovely Cloquet Forestry Center on his way home from town, Chris saw a bear on the road. There was no traffic, so Chris stopped in the middle of the road, held up his phone, and snapped three photos before the bear ambled off into the woods. This time (probably because the photos turned out), he didn't bother following the bear into the woods and simply continued on his way. 

Chris's first successful photo of a bear in the wild.
Black bear in the Cloquet Forestry Center in July 2023

However, this summer our next-door neighbors have been seeing a young bear in their yard and even captured a few videos, much to our (good-natured) jealousy. We very much hoped it would make its way into our yard, too, and yesterday, it did!  I was enjoying my morning coffee when movement near the compost pile just outside my coffeehouse window caught my eye; at first, I thought it was a black dog, but I didn't know of any black dogs in our neighborhood. I leaned over to get a better vantage and ... 

"Oh! Bear!" I whispered and fumbled for my phone. The young bear, which was maybe the size of a German shepherd, heard me through the open window, and by the time I'd located my phone, the startled (and very shy) bear was running away, and I got only one good look at it before it disappeared into the woods on the other side of the gravel road. I didn't even have time to launch the camera app.

I went outside and across our driveway into the house to tell my husband what I'd seen, and he immediately followed me and looked around the area.  

"Next time, be quiet," he lectured me, "and get a picture!" 

"You could set up a game camera," I suggested.  

"That's a good idea," he answered, and set one up in the arbor vitae next to the compost pile.

No bear pics yet, but I'll update this article if we do get one.  For now, you can read up on Ursus americanus.