Ah, the stillness of the black sky gleaming with dazzling stars slowly peaking from behind their curtain. The gentle hum of a breeze caressing the tall grasses and green leaves of lush late spring. The air is nearly romantic with its dry cool temperature, and a bat chirps briefly overhead, keeping the bugs at bay around your campsite.

And then of course, the comforting sound of black bears moaning and growling somewhere not too far off, perhaps just down the hill from where you are.
As you unroll your sleeping bag and nestle down for the night, their songs become your nightcap…

…Sweet dreams, you little happy camper, you…

I bet this isn’t exactly the type of “yay nature” experience you were thinking of when you paid way too much for that adorable “Life is Good” ^TM bumper sticker from REI. Where is the Life is Good bumper sticker with Stick Figure Guy flailing in the rush of adrenaline as a grizzly has already begun eating his intestines?
Where is the Life is Good bumper sticker with little stick man covered in a nest of seed ticks?
Where is the Life is Good bumper sticker that shows the family of Stick People waking to find their campsite ransacked by coons, because they failed to appropriately pack away their cooler and trash bag after dinner the night before? True stories, man. Wilderness school.

These are essential experiences when you are “getting away from civilization” in my opinion. Notice I did not say “essential experiences to avoid.” As a species that has perfected the art of insulating our entire existence, we are better for having to suffer these genuinely unpredictable encounters.
They humble you. They show you what nature is really like. They even have a way of disciplining us and curbing our ego, and ultimately make us more grateful for the truly important things in our lives.

It’s honestly kind of exciting when things turn a little unpredictable and risky.

I’m not encouraging anyone to do anything downright stupid, let’s just be clear. But something important happens when we are left to our own devices, capability, and personal responsibility in natural settings, and things happen outside our expectations. You don’t get that by going to a zoo, unless you are one of the poor souls who happened to see one of those great jungle animals go ape-shit on a caretaker or arrogant visitor. Those poor animals start going crazy after too much solitary confinement and fuckery from the homo sapiens, as would we if put in their situation.
Talk about sobering moments.

Too many of us have never had to learn to survive or merely respect nature. We’ve never had to adapt to the radical natural elements around us such as variations in temperature, humidity, or elevation. We are raised to think that we can buy highly volatile spray to eradicate unwelcome guests from the place where we’d like to reside, purely on the basis of “I’d like to be here now, and I don’t want you here, too.” We’re completely unsettled the second there’s a bug within our proximity. We can’t feel at ease unless we’ve got freshly clean clothes chemical washed in Tide and bleach, and fluffed out with toxic dryer sheets.

It’s sad to say, but for most of us, we’ve gotten soft. Downy soft. You know what bears do to downy soft kind of people???

In the last two weeks that I’ve been on a road trip through Colorado, the amount of wildlife I’ve encountered has been staggering. I’ve been staying in my truck just about every night, barring one exception when I visited a friend in Denver. For as much time as I have spent in this state throughout my life, I continue to encounter new animals I’ve never seen before. Furthermore, I can guarantee you that these encounters would be greatly diminished if I were only visiting the well maintained parks and staying in cabins or motels.

Just last night I was car-camping in what is technically a residential area, but still an area that is very open and less tampered with than a “clear-cut, copy, and paste” looking housing development. The scenario I described at the beginning of this blog was basically my night last night. I had my car door wide open as I brushed my teeth and got my bed ready, just enjoying myself, when all of a sudden I notice there is this sound quietly erupting from down the hill. I wanted to tell myself it was a cow, but I grew up in Arkansas, and we are familiar enough with cows. Suffice it to say that if this had been a cow, something would have been terrifyingly wrong with it.

Coincidentally, only two days prior, a friend and I were hiking this beautiful trail running through Allenspark, CO. We were a few miles out before making it back to the car, and I heard that same kind of hoarse raspy howl of a moan (I’m still not sure what to call this vocalization) in conjunction with a snapping crash of a small branch or dead tree. Part of my brain wanted to write off the noise as the strangest raven that could possibly exist, but that didn’t explain that cracking branch- and also my gut knew better. My head whipped around as I made out what was undeniably a huge black bear’s body bumbling back and forth as it sauntered through the trees, literally right in our direction, flapping jaw agape as it faced us. He was maybe 50 ft away, 100 at most.

I’ve seen bears before a number of times in Colorado, from behind and from the side, but never dead on facing one another.
Can I tell you what kind of aliveness quickened into our bodies in that moment? All day I had felt so freaking tired that I could have collapsed from hiking at any moment and fallen into a deep nap. My steps had been sloppy and my ass had been dragging.
No longer was such the case after seeing that bear’s face, his jowls awkwardly stretching and chewing as he stumbled down the hill.

The hike had been pristine, but it had only been nice until that point.
The bear however had been frightening and awesome as fuck.
Guess what made the highlight reel for our hike that day?

The panoramic views of giant snow covered bowls in the mountain ranges across the horizon?
The clear snowmelt lake at the crest of our hike?
The free bandana I scored, left behind by some less put together hiker before us?

Naw man, forget all that. It’s all about ole’ Big Bear.

(And kind of the bandana. I have quite a collection going.) But seriously.

Hearing these moany huffs and howls within range of where I slept last night was indeed unnerving at first… all sorts of questions you’ve never needed to consider and that probably aren’t even reasonable start running through your mind, like,
“Can they break these windows in one fell blow? Can he smell the food in here? Would he come up to my shoddy vehicle smelling the food and then realize there was a much larger bonus snack on the menu that he’d rather have?  Hominid tartar?”

It’s a strange mix of emotions. On one hand your biological body is running all the emergency messages, preparing for fight or flight. In this case it’s realistically only preparing for flight. Though on the other hand, this other part of your awareness is simply in awe of the creature. That part of you wants to stay ever so still, to catch a glimpse if you can before it notices you.
It wants to experience the bear.
Hilariously, that part of us is usually naïve as hell about the Bear, too.

Perhaps though, this can be our spiritual body’s awareness when it has learned to be present and not overcome with fear in a moment of intimidation or uncertainty. Sitting alone in my truck that night, I found myself wanting to keep the door open, to listen closely, make out as much nuance in the creature’s (or creatures’, but I’ll never know for sure now) murmurs to hear what they were up to, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt if it was who I thought it was…

And then I noticed that this weird thing has happened to me over the years… As terrifying and unsettling as it can be to know that a megafauna predator is right outside your door, I almost prefer living this way now. No, not with a constant threat in my life, but rather not so protected from the wildness of this planet that I can live in some illusion of disconnection from it- real reality, I mean. There’s a strange sense of peace that accompanies this experience of living in closer proximity to perceived danger that I don’t have a clue how to explain. It’s completely counterintuitive.

What does actually scare me and keeps me from sleeping well is worrying about people I might encounter who are not connected to empathy or their natural being. People that are trigger happy, fearfully defensive of intruders. And probably rightfully so. Or crazy rumored serial killers on the Appalachian trail… that shit is probably the most disturbing and deterring when considering what you might stumble upon in the wild.

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One of the other most hair-raising animal encounters I’ve had was when I visited Costa Rica in 2014, and hiked arguably *the* most unique mountain I’ve ever faced in my life. Round trip, the trail I followed was about 24 miles or so from where I started, with 5,000 feet of elevation gain; to complete the entire journey in one day, my weak ass needed to start around 1:30 AM… (#nosleeptilbrooklyn)
…In the pitch black jungle. Completely. Fucking. Alone…

…or so I thought.

This area of central Costa Rica was crazy beautiful, even by general Costa Rica standards. The trail ascends through 4 different biomes- starting out in the tropical rainforest, advancing into bonafide old growth forest after sunrise, and pushing through a windy arid high desert stretch before finishing in a cloud-soaked alpine tundra before reaching the summit.

I had no idea what I was in for on this day, except for pain and duress to some degree. I had hardly slept, maybe an hour, and set out on a trail I knew nothing about. Some of it I wouldn’t end up seeing until that afternoon on the descent.

I didn’t have the best headlamp ever, so my range of sight was more limited than normal, especially being in thick rainforest. It was the kind of dark where you can’t see your hand in front of your face, much less 25 feet in front of you when you hear a massive animal pushing through all the foliage and tree fall.

Had I been on my home turf, my imagination could have configured with some probability that it might’ve been an unusually large deer. They can have quite an earthshaking sudden presence inder the right circumstances. Trust me. However this was completely unfamiliar territory, and that sound- more reminiscent of a lowrider bulldozer- was no deer.
As silly as it seems, the only “probable” creatures my panicked self could think of was a puma or a 20-foot anaconda. (Not logical, I know.)
You laugh now (hell, I laugh now), but you didn’t hear what I heard, where and when I heard it, man.😅

“The sound” happened just ahead of me on the path, moving toward the trail, meaning one of us was going to cross the other’s path… but who would be first? I was frozen but did NOT want to stick around just to see death stare me in the face. Within seconds, adrenaline took over and without thinking I sprinted dead ahead, suddenly possessed by a cathartic panic. I was too far from the trailhead at this point for anyone to hear me scream, and I have never run so fast in my life.

And then maybe 20 minutes later, the sound happened AGAIN.

By this point my whole body is trembling because I have no way of knowing if I am distancing myself, if whatever it is is tracking me, or if this is a second animal altogether. My mantra for sanity became,
“In two hours, the sun will come up…
In two hours the sun will come up…
eventually the sun will be coming up…
eventually the sun will come up…”

It felt like being blind in a haunted house, except with a chance that the zombies might actually kill you.
Relief trickled in eventually, with moments to peek out above portions of the jungle canopy and gain glimpses of some kind of “beyond” from where I stood on the trail, offering a ridge line silhouette against the sky that contrasted a soft dark blue against all that had been black for the previous 5 hours. The fear was over, but the next 12 hours of immense physical challenges had just begun.

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In the early evening I hobbled back to my hostel looking like abused hell after the near marathon of steep trail that I hadn’t exactly trained for (plus, I busted my knee open at only the halfway point after recovering from a little mild altitude sickness).
As I recounted my drama, the hostel owner kindly informed me that the animals I had encountered early that morning were probably just Tapirs.

“Tapirs, goddammit. That’s it?”

“Yeah, they’re super common out here.”

I wasted all that adrenaline on the Costa Rican jungle’s version of Pumba from the Lion King basically. For those of you that don’t know, Tapirs are an overgrown less fierce cousins of rhinoceri, and horses, but without any equipment or attitude to make them intimidating- the kind of animals that are so ugly they end up being a pitiable type of cute.
Tuskless, fangless, clawless, shoeless vegetarians.

Had someone told me about tapirs in the middle of the night during my hike, I would have been relieved, but now my ego wanted to believe it was some exotic anaconda (that didn’t actually exist in these parts) in order to justify my drama.

Ego: checked.

Which brings me back to my previous point about letting nature scare you every once in a while, or regularly. Not only do those experiences switch on our whole being into feeling more alive and connected to our surroundings and ourselves, but it has the power to check our delusional pride, whichever way that pride is manifesting. The people that learn to live in harmony with these places are people that have shed layers of their ego that us city and suburb dwellers end up staying stuck with. I see it time and time again.

I’ve talked a good bit in my blogs cumulatively between this platform and my youtube about Adventure vs. Vacation. I’m not necessarily anti-vacation. It has a time and place. But when you are deciding to get away and experience some place new, I implore you to not always take the most comfortable options available, like pack mules up an epic hike or having a guide to lead you. Alternatively, you could learn what skills you need to do it on your own and responsibly care for the place you are wanting to experience and explore. It’s a rite of passage, in my opinion, and a grounding reminder of what we actually come from, who we are, and what we might actually be capable of that we haven’t tapped into yet.
What I’d actually like you to do is intentionally and creatively simplify your agenda and put yourself in situations that will strip down your sense security, but I’ll let you interpret this how you will. 🙂

*** Bonus question: I still don’t know what to call the sounds that bears make. Wanna vote?

Moany howls?
Howly moans?
Grunty huffs?
Snorty bellows?
Chewbakka barks?
Tyrannosauric Opera??

You Decide! Chip in in the comment section.