Big foot print

John and I went camping for the 4th of July weekend. As usual, we didn’t go to any established campgrounds, we just took the van out into the middle of nowhere. It took us about 3 hours to get out there – from the Rio Puerco valley off Hwy 550, through BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, past Cabezon Peak toward the north side of Mt. Taylor and into the Forest Service land there.

We got out there the afternoon of July 3. On the morning of July 4 we went for a hike (more like a walk, I’m still lacking energy). We were walking along a narrow wildlife trail not too far from the van, when we saw bear prints.

Here’s with John’s hand for scale:

This one is cool, you can see where the grass smashed and made grass prints in the sand under the bear’s foot and then it sprang back up again unharmed.

Of course John went looking for bear caves, like that’s what we need, to disturb a bear in a cave.

I just took pretty pictures of trees and figured the bear was too smart to be out in the heat of the late morning.

Next thing we knew, I had a little bear cub following me at a cautious distance…no, lol, that’s just Kai the poodle, dragging in the heat.

Later we had rain, which cooled everything down and erased the bear prints.

On the morning of July 6 we were on a different nearby wildlife trail and saw another set of prints, fresh ones since the rains. It was weird for me to realize the bear was still hanging around so close by, and hadn’t just been passing through.

So of course we had to look again for more caves. John pretended he just likes walking along the rock edge.

It’s true, John does just like walking along the rocks, but he was also looking for another cave. And he found one, deeper than the first one.

John took that cave picture. I hung back. Yeah, you go wake up the bear. Someone has to survive to drive the van home.

You can’t really tell because I took the picture from so far away, but here’s John peering into the cave. “Knock, knock, anyone home? Black bear, black bear, where are you bear?”

We never actually saw the bear, but John’s wildlife camera captured it early one morning before dawn. Unfortunately and ironically, the bear was too close to the camera and we barely got the top few inches of him. But yeah, that’s a bear.

Here’s pictures from our drive home.

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