Bear in a Prius

Just when we see the season winding down a touch in September, of course, we have to have a young bear come to Northwind Lodge in search of food.   Momma bear kicked him to the curb as he was the size of a large dog with a big head.  It was time for him to leave.  He was cute,  but unfortunately not very afraid of people.

While the bear haranguing the Cabin #2 garbage can,   I attacked him with a rock to try to get him to associate people with a painful experience.  The rock missed it's mark.  He  ran around the corner and almost instantly came back.  I zinged some more rocks but he's still not going too far from me. He slowly sauntered off into the brush.  So, we picked up all the garbage and got it out of there.  Later that day, he came back and rolled around a few empty garbage cans and then destroyed a few choke cherry trees scattered about the yard.  Bears do like their choke cherries.

A yoga-teacher friend of my wife Annette was staying with us in the TreeTopHaus  at the lodge for a few days.  Elayna is from Toronto and a very pleasant, empathic woman.  She’s  who you want around if you get a boo-boo or if you need a hand with something -  a kind and very helpful woman. 

I stepped out of Red Rock Wilderness Store here at the lodge, for some reason and looked towards the resort.  Some of our lodge guests were walking away towards the resort.  It was a couple with a two little kids who had just come in for something in the store.  Coming towards me but about 100 yards out yet, was Elayna.  I marveled at Elayna as she stopped to chat with the young family.  I couldn’t hear her, but she warmly shook hands with the parents, laughed, chatted, and bent down to shake hands with both of the little kids and then proceeded to hug them both.   It was something to see.  I was bit envious because I just don’t have “warm & cuddly” in me but I was happy to know someone who did.  Elayna is a natural.

She calmly waved goodbye to the family and then began an exponentially-faster walk towards me with a look of deep concern on her face.  It was like she just witnessed a murder  and the murderer saw her face.  It was utter trepidation and almost panic!  I was confused.

When she got closer, she quietly and urgently said, “There’s a bear!”

I asked where and she said, “There’s a bear in a car and he’s eating all of their food!!!!!!!”

“What!???” I said.  I just got done watching Elayna doing a casual, calm introduction of herself to a young family of Northwind Lodge guests.  She just got through hugging somebody’s children as if they were her very own.  “What the hell is she talking about!”, I was now wondering.

“You gotta go, Joe!  There’s a bear in a car!”  she breathed desperately to me noticing that I was getting mixed signals to say the least.  The "bear" part was not jiving with the rest of what I just witnessed.

OH!  Now it registered with me!  There's a bear causing problems with a car!   She told me the general direction and I took off like a bat out of hell down the road towards Cabin #6.  

That bear had come back to the resort again.   Elayna was coming across the footbridge that crosses Jasper Creek and walking up the path when she noted that a wild bear jumped into the back seat of a Toyota Prius which had its doors left open.   In the car, he was proceeding to have a field day with bags of candy and possibly Timmy the Hermit Crab.  (Somebody brought along a pet.)  Mind you, this is not something that one sees in downtown Toronto very often, so Elayna was a little rattled.  The bear even opened Timmy's little hermit crab box but hadn't made it to sample the fresh seafood - yet.  This was an observation that Elayna reported quietly with great excitement in her whisper that there was a bear in somebody's car eating their food!!!!!!  Sure enough when I arrived, there he was in the backseat rootin' around in the assorted colorful junk owned by two little girls.  Candy wrappers and a potato chip bag were strewn about outside the car.  It was a veritable cornucopia of fun – for little girls and obviously, bears.  They must think along the same lines.

From the back of the car parked by Cabin 6 (with two doors and the rear hatch open), I yelled in a gruff voice, "HEY!".    The bear looked at me through the open rear hatch door, paused and then turned  to escape by  bashing his thick bear skull on the un-opened driver-side backseat door to get out.  He was a bear, so no, he couldn’t just take the easy, big open door in front of him and leave.  He was going to go out Rambo-style and take the glass of the closed door with him.  For fear of him running around the car in tight circles and shredding everything in sight with his claws , I stepped back and peeked around the corner of a storage shed while I kept quiet to watch and wait if the dummy would come out sensibly.  Then, while under no threat of attack, he quickly went out the way he came in - through the open door.   I chased after him, hot on his heels screaming and yelling awful things.  Bears have to learn that humans are frightful creatures.  This bear was a slow learner.  I think his mom held him back a grade.

He ran down past Cabin 3, took a right turn, and headed down the trail towards the beach and right into Eli Preble who was staying with his dad in Cabin #3.  He surprised the heck out of Eli, who stepped off the path to the side and the bear shot past him.  So now, Eli was rattled as well.  Then, he noiselessly disappeared into the brush as only bears can do.  They just slip away.  But for the candy wrappers and the whites of Eli's eyes, you'd never even know he was there.
 

Maybe this bear only has a penchant for hybrids.  Early the next morning the lady in Cabin #6 who owned the Prius heard a noise by the car and looked out.  There on the roof of her car was that same bear walking around, trying to figure out how to open up the large battery-powered tin can with the food in it.  Then, while she watched, he slid down the windshield like a kid on a slide in the park and proceeded to grab a windshield wiper and yank on it like it was the lever that opened the safe.  At this point, she finally decided that it was less cute that the bear was destroying her car, so she opened the cabin door, took a step out on the deck and yelled at the bear.  The bear slid off the car and high-tailed it out of there. 

Dang bear scratched and dented her car because they don’t build ‘em like they used to, apparently.   She thought it was neat and a souvenir of their stay at Northwind Lodge in Ely, Minnesota. 

Errr….OK, then!  Chalk one up for entertainment at Northwind Lodge!

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Who Built This?

A while back, not too many years ago, a young guy in his mid-thirties came into  the store here to find out about possibly buying a new Souris River Canoe.   Being that our store is out in the woods on a beautiful lake here called Jasper, that alone is one thing of fascination for many of our store customers.   Most people on a shopping adventure end up going to the populated area and concrete jungle of Ely to wander the stores in a more civilized environment.  Our store at Northwind Lodge is not only sizeable with a great selection of products, gear and fishing tackle, but it is located almost at the end of the road, at our resort called Northwind Lodge.  We are surrounded by the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on three sides.  But for a few gift shops and maybe a pegboard wall with some tackle on it, other resorts around the state of Minnesota usually don’t have anything quite like this.  A beautiful resort with clean, housekeeping cabins on a small lake with few people AND a store.   As a result, Red Rock attracts people to Northwind Lodge not necessarily with the intention to stay here, but they are usually a bit surprised that the resort with housekeeping cabins is here on the Fernberg road.  We usually do a lot of explaining that Red Rock and the Northwind Lodge are under the same ownership but market them separately for the very reason that people are easily overwhelmed and confused with too many bits of information all tied up in one spot.

Well, anyway, this guy wanted to test paddle a Quetico 17 because he correctly heard that as far as general purpose, Boundary Waters canoes go, nothing beats a Souris River Quetico 17 for a whole host of reasons.   Based on my own in-depth knowledge of that canoe and  other brand Kevlar canoes, he would not even need to test paddle it. The canoe is unflappable for 99% of all general, recreation-use paddlers on the planet.   But, my being in a sales position always tests many peoples’ sense of skepticism before they buy something and he needed pudding with proof in it.  So, I flipped a 43 lb., Kevlar,  Souris River Quetico 17 up on my shoulders.  While ooo & aww’ing about me picking up the canoe, he grabs the paddles and PFD’s and to the lake we head from Red Rock which is on the outer edge of the resort and about 100 yards from Jasper Creek.  It's only a minute or two to the Northwind Lodge beach.

As we are walking along, he (and almost everybody else) asks from behind me if that noise ahead of us is a waterfall to which I say “yes”.   We make it to the trail from the road edge and to the first foot bridge that leads over the creek which is moving along nicely.  In the middle of the bridge he stops behind me to look over the 15 foot wide, gurgling swath of white noise as it sparkled furiously below in the leaf-filtered sun’s rays.   There is a look of marvel in his eyes as he yells to me, while I’m now across the bridge and turning the canoe to follow the trail to the lake amid the ash trees, “ Wow! Who did this?”

I said, “Excuse me?”  I expected that I knew where this big city kid was going with this, but I’d decided to play along.  The canoe on my shoulders was pretty lightweight so I had time to engage.

“Who did you hire to do this?  The layout and design?  It’s FABULOUS!!!” he  queried all excited about how beautiful Jasper Creek is.   I thought  “Wow!”  He actually thinks we hired an architectural firm named Hanson, Rogers and Flipperding to design Jasper Creek.  Then we hired a highly respected eco-excavation company (who burns love in their fuel tanks instead of diesel) to install it with tender care just like they do at Disneyland and the tourists are all dazzled by it.

To answer him I responded with a question, sort of, “Err, God?  Mother Nature?  Bhudda?  Pick whichever one serves your belief system.”

Photo courtesy of  Hanson, Rogers and Flipperding
(Landscape Architects Extraordinaire)

Then, a slightly sheepish look came across his face as he said “Ohhhh” as he realized that most of those rocks have laid there in that water for abouty 30,000 years or longer -  whenever the last glacier left us.

And, then we continued down to the lake and he noticed the resort cabins on the hillside overlooking the beach area.   He wanted know what this place was – with the beautiful creek and rental cabins nestled in the woods.  I explained that it is our resort, Northwind Lodge and as he took it all in at the beach, you could see the processing taking place.  Then he wondered how long I’ve had this place and I replied “for about 50 years – I grew up here, pretty much.”    He shook his head in amazement and declared “what a beautiful place to grow up” it was.  I agreed.

It was then that he remembered his original purpose, and we both sat down in that canoe and shoved off the shore to take that test paddle.   When we got back to shore after about 15 minutes, he said to me, “You already knew what I was going to find when I took this canoe on the water, didn’t you?.”   I just smiled.

He loaded up a new Souris River Quetico 17 on his car and off to the great blue yonder it went with him.  Before he left, he took a picture of the waterfall at Jasper Creek like so many people have done for my whole life here at Northwind Lodge, just outside of the BWCA, near Ely.

Jasper Creek Fall at Northwind Lodge

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