Sarah and I woke to a rainy day at Waterton Lake. Nevertheless, we were greeted by the morning light hitting the mountains surrounding the lake in a stunning way. And just as I was about to leave the lake, I looked up and saw l a magnificent rainbow. Perhaps this was foreboding of a positive day. Or perhaps not. I’ll leave that for you readers to decide.

Sarah and I made good time for the first few miles. When she stopped to take off her rain jacket, I meandered on down the trail a bit. After cresting a rise, I went around a bend. When I looked up there was a very large grizzly bear standing crosswise on the trail about 80 feet ahead of me.

I stopped and my first thought was, “oh, a bear. I should get a pictire.” Luckily I quickly came to my senses and told myself, “no, you fool. Get out the bear spray.”

Just as I pulled it from the holster on my hip while slowly backing down the trail, the bear put his head down and charged.

I remember thinking, ” oh shit, this is real.” Juggling the bear spray I raised both of my poles above my head and began yelling at the bear. Amazingly this huge, beautiful male bear sporting a long shaggy coat with a golden mantle over his humped shoulders stopped in his tracks. He shook himself a bit and I thought it had been a bluff charge.

But now he was maybe 40 feet from me. If I was to deploy the bear spray, which I was hoping not to do, he had to be still a bit closer. Yipes! I wanted to avoid that.

I kept yelling and backing down the trail, afraid of tripping while walking backwards downhill, especially since I was still waving my poles and hollering while juggling the can of bear spray.

When he took a few steps towards me I turned my back to him and increased my speed to put more distance between us. I didn’t run, but I did pick up my pace thinking walking forward was safer than backing down the trail. What a mistake! As soon as I turned I saw the bear once again start after me.

Readying my spray I turned to face him, again screaming and clapping my poles above my head. At this point I had reached Sarah who was wondering what I was yelling at. I told her to get her bear spray out and move down the trail. When we increased the distance between us and the bear, we turned and started moving forward away from the bruin and back the way we had come. But each time we turned to look behind us we saw the bear still moving towards us. With Sarah’s help I managed to get my very loud whistle to my lips and began blowing it as fast as I could. What a sight we must have been, blowing a whistle, waving poles over our heads and trying to juggle bear spray while slowly moving down the trail.

At this point, I was fairly convinced he mostly wanted us off the trail and wasn’t looking to make an aggressive attack. Sarah and I discussed whether we could get off the trail, but one side went steeply up and the other dropped down. Both sides were covered in thick underbrush with many blow downs, I didn’t want to get trapped in one of those places with a bear coming at me so we stayed on the trail, undoing a bit of hiking we had just done.

Finally, when we looked back, we no longer saw the bear so we waited in place for a while, constantly blowing the whistle and yelling “go bear go.” Then came the scary part of turning around and walking back up the trail again. We went at a snails pace, looking carefully around each blind spot on the trail, yelling and blowing my whistle for miles, especially since we kept encountering fresh bear scat. A few times we thought we heard it in the bushes, and of course every black or brown object now looked like a bear.

We spent the rest of that rainy day hiking fairly close together.

I finally broke a rule I try to keep to when hiking, which is not to take anything to numb the pain while I’m walking. My concern is that if I do this then I will walk past pain to a point where I could really have a serious injury. But I knew we had quite a few miles to go that night, including one significant climb and descent, and we had already lost quite a bit of time with the bear, so I took some ibuprofen. It didn’t completely knock the pain out of my feet, but it did turn the volume down so I wasn’t wincing every step of the way. But now Sarah was also having some foot issues. We stopped a few times to tape up her blistering feet. None of us had had dry feet for the four days we had been out and it was taking a toll on all of us.

In many places the trail was overgrown, which is never a pleasant thing to push through especially on a wet day. It’s even worse when you’re going through brush over your head wondering if there’s a bear just around the corner. Nevertheless, we soldiered on and were making decent progress when I hit one of a number of fast moving water crossings. I sat there waiting for Sarah to catch me, and as the roar of the water registered in my brain I noticed it could be a tricky crossing. All of a sudden the morning’s experience hit me and I felt the little girl in me saying “I just wanna go home. Please get me out of here. I don’t wanna be here anymore. Why do we have to keep doing this?” Then I stepped into the creek and carefully made my way across, avoiding one deep hole that would have swallowed me over my waist. When I got to the other side, I waited for Sarah. After I pointed out the hole to her, she stepped in and waded across as if it was nothing. She has definitely earned her name of Mighty Mouse.

Mary, who had left camp hours after I did, caught up with me at another series of water crossings. We hiked the rest of the way into camp together in a pouring rain having to be careful not to slide and fall on the completely muddy trail.

We arrived at our designated campsite that evening as the rain was letting up. It was a beautiful spot and I thought maybe that was the end of the holy shit day. But then I discovered I had lost my only eating utensil and was about to fashion some chopsticks out of my tent stakes or some sticks, when Mary offered to let me use her spoon. We all spread out our gear to dry while we were eating and that’s when the night threw one more curveball my way. Without any warning, the sky again let loose a downpour, drenching all the gear we had spread out to dry. It filled my open pack and made it difficult to hang my food bag.

After covering my pack with my umbrella, I got the food bag hung. Then I managed to set up my tent in the pouring rain. I climbed in grateful that my sleeping bag was stillrelatively dry. I took another ibuprofen to knock down the pain in my feet so I could sleep and put an end to the day that had started with the incredible rainbow.

Was I unlucky for having run into the bear or was I lucky to have escaped it? I have no idea. I just know if it never happens again that would be OK with me.