Today we catch the private ferry to Glacier Park in the evening. Celebration 2008 has ended, we’ve walked the streets of Juneau and flown the Five Glaciers. What to do? The hotel shuttle will take us to within 1 mile of the Mendenhall Glacier visitor’s center, so we decide to do that. Only these darn tourists keep arriving at the airport and tying up the shuttle. We talk with another person waiting in the lobby- a computer programmer from Atlanta who is about to start his 3rd week of work on the government’s computers. He gives us a ride right to the visitor’s center – sort of for something to do on his day off. It was a really nice thing to do – typical of what Alaska does to people, I think.

Here's the Mendenhall Glacier from a spot about 1/4 of a mile from the Visitor Center - that makes us about 1 mile from the glacier itself. It's really difficult to get the scale of this glacier in a photo. It is huge.



Alaska literature is filled with information about what to do if you should meet a bear while out walking. In case you don’t follow the advice, there are also books of lurid tales of what happened to those people who did not. A recent movie takes us through the life of a man who became famous for being best buddies with the bears – until the day they ate him and his girlfriend. The ranger hikes all begin with bear encounter survival tips. Statistics encourage us to believe we will survive meeting a bear. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all human-bear interactions in the wild end up with the human unharmed – things like that. Just to be sure, the Glacier Lodge store sells Bear Pepperspray in a quite large container, with the guarantee that it “might help” if a bear attacks you. “Talk to the bear” say some people, so it will know you are not another bear- bears being notoriously nearsighted, and utterly uninterested in large beings that are not bears.

All this advice is well and good, but you don’t know what you will do when you meet a bear until you meet a bear. I found out what I would do about 1000 feet down the trail from the visitor center out to the waterfall by the Mendenhall Glacier. We were walking along, and another couple was just ahead of us, and up the hill a bit, when a bear came ambling out of the bushes a few feet from us. There is a difference in gender response here, I think, because the man’s companion ran off down the trail, despite all instructions never to run and her companion's iterations of them. I don’t know what Mary Alice did because, like the man above me, I was too busy getting my camera out and taking a picture. I snapped a good one



And then heard Mary Alice suggesting frequently that I join her at her position somewhat more distant from the bear, where she and the other man's companion were. Sounded like a good plan, really, and the bear was walking into the brush so no more good shots were coming up. So, I joined Mary Alice. Now I know what I would do if a bear appeared near me: document it. Must be my old COG training.

PS The bear buddy guy who got eaten inadvertantly documented it, also. An audio recorder got some 6 minutes of it, which gave the police investigator nightmares. Some things God does not intend for us to know, and what it feels like to be eaten alive by a bear is one of them, it seems.