Renegade Camping Part 4: Animals?

[dmulk]

Not really only related to Renegade Camping....but let's hear about some Animal encounters while bike camping?

Cheers!

<D>

[NoBull]

It wasnt bike camping, but jeep camping. The kids and I were doing our annual boys trip. I would let them pick a road any road and we followed it until we found a place to camp. We had our old dog in the tent with us, her sight wasnt to good anymore. In the middle of the night I woke to foot steps outside the tent, sounded like a few different animals. They circled the tent and campsite. I finally decided I better get up and check it out. They ran before I saw anything, but we heard the chatter of Coyotes soon after.

[Bones]

Camping in Moreau State Park (NY State along Hudson River). Got up at the crack of dawn and walked down to the riverbank. By chance one of the guys I was riding with walked down to the same spot a couple minutes later. As we sat there watching day break, a juvenile bald eagle (nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah) came out of nowhere, landed on the tree branch perhaps 20 feet away and had a look around. When it got a look at us in bobbed its head, spread its wings and took off. The sound of a bird that big, that close, taking off is intense. Magnificent creature.

[sparkinator]

Last year camping in Yellowstone, I was a little uneasy about the idea of bear encounters. When I got to Yellowstone, it had started snowing, so I found the first decent campsite I could find. I wanted one in the middle of the campground (being mindful of bears), but all of them were taken, so I settled for a scenic one on the outer edge of the campground.

As soon as I got my tent up and bike unloaded, I heard a group of campers a couple of sites over from mine, looking intently into the woods and they were excited about what they were hearing and seeing as they peered into the woods. I wasn't sure what they were looking at, but I was sizing them up because if it was a bear, I just wanted to be able to outrun them, not necessarily outrun the bear!!

Well, it wasn't bears they were peering at, but just a mountain stream some of them had eased over into the forest to explore. I didn't think much about it further, but somewhere in my subconcious, it must have stuck. In the middle of the night, the bears came to life in my dreams, and they were tearing into my little tent with a fury. I was trying to get away and my mummy sleeping bag was constricting to the point that as I woke up, I thought they HAD ME!!!! I was amazed I didn't tear up everything I had that night trying to get away from an imaginary bear.

Those kinds of stories just don't come about from moteling IT!!