| Summary | None |
| Owner | Adam Rosenfield |
| Creation Date | 2013-08-20 21:37:33 UTC-0400 |
| Description | July 27-28, 2013
~16 miles of hiking Adam Rosenfield, Denise Chin, Emily Geosling, Jay Monty, Jon Crowe, Michelle Moon, Mike Kokko After a nice stay at the Tufts Loj on Friday night, we hit the trail bright...and not-quite-early...Saturday morning. We dropped off a car at the Gale River Tr trailhead, and then hopped over to the nearby Garfield Ridge Tr trailhead. When we got up to the ridge line, we dropped our packs to go up and tag Mt. Garfield, which has excellent 360-degree views all around the Pemi, as well as a nice old foundation up there for shelter from the wind. We hiked down the other side of the ridge to camp out at the 13 Falls Tentsite in the wilderness. The caretaker there informed as that just the previous day, a bear had wandered into the nearby Guyot Campsite and done some damage to the caretaker's tent there. Little did we know, another bear (or perhaps the same bear) was getting ready to pay us a visit as well. It came by just after dark while a few of us had gone down to the river to watch for shooting stars, the night before the supposed peak of a meteor shower. One group had just arrived at the tent site, and though they were planning to move all of their smellables into the kitchen area, they left their food unattended in their packs for a brief moment, but that was all the time the bear needed. One claw swipe opened up the top of a backpack, and the food came out. It put a hole in Jay's backpack, who accidentally left a piece of a candy wrapper with some crumbs in there. It also tore through Jon and Michelle's tent (when they weren't there, fortunately). Another group also arrived late and found that the two bear boxes at the tent site were completely full, so they decided to hang their food instead. No good, they didn't hang it high enough, and the bear brought it down and got away with half their food before they could scare it off. They later moved things around and made room in the bear boxes. That wasn't the end of it, though. It came back around the site around 11 at night, when we were asleep (or trying to sleep). Mike, ever the diligent guardian, was roughing it in a bivy sack, and hadn't fallen asleep yet. The bear was roaming around silently, carefully sniffing every backpack, but Mike managed to scare it off. 45 minutes later, it was back for round 3. Again, trying to find food in backpacks. This time it didn't run off until Mike tried throwing a rock at it. I wouldn't have tried that, for fear that that would enrage it, but it was enough. As far as we know, it didn't come back again that night, but I don't think any of us slept well after that episode. On Sunday morning, we surveyed the damage. Jon found his pack had gotten dragged 50 feet into the woods but was otherwise undamaged. Nobody got hurt, and for that we're thankful, and the worst was that some other people lost a fair amount of food. After a slow breakfast, we packed up and hit the trail again, heading back up towards Galehead. We bagged Galehead, again dropping packs for the summit spur; I forgot my Rubik's Cube halfway up (my summit ritual is to solve a Rubik's Cube on top of the 48 4000-footers), so I had to dash back down to my pack to retrieve it, adding on a couple of unnecessary tenths of a mile. After lunch at the Galehead Hut, we went back down the Gale River Tr to the car we left there, retrieved the other cars, and headed back home. A successful trip, despite a bear invasion. |