DAY 58: We Pert Near Got Ate By A Grizzly Today!!

DAY 58:  Jackson Hole, Wyoming - August 26, 2010

Boy howdy, do I have a story for you today!!

We just about got ate by a GRIZZLY BEAR today!!!   Ya, thats right.....not a Polar Bear or a Brown Bear or a Sloth Bear and not a Giant Panda......but a GRIZZLY BEAR!

Now, I must tell you that we didn't actually "see" the Grizzly Bear, but we knew he was there....Here's what happened...

We had a long ride on the bike today just to get to the Grand Tetons.....about 1 1/2 hours.  We got so caught up in stopping everywhere in the Teton National Forest taking 1000's of pictures, that we lost tract of time.... By the time we realized this, it was late afternoon, so we decided to check out the map and see if there was a shortcut to get back to the RV.  And low and behold, we found an itsy, bitsy, tiny road on the map that showed it went from just north of where we were, directly back to Ashton where we were staying.  HOT DOG!  The first clue that this wasn't a "real" road was the fact that it didn't have a solid line.......it was a broken line on the map.  I figured this must mean its a dirt road, but hey, it was a shortcut and I didn't figure Chuck needed to know that until he absolutely needed to know that.

So off we went.  We found the road okay and, sure enough, it turned into a bumpy, dirt road just as I had suspected.  We went a few miles up that road when we saw a road sign (ya, I thought that was weird too.....a road sign in the middle of nowhere on a very unused dirt road) that said "Ashton - 47 miles".  Now, considering we had about 150 miles if we were to go back to Jackson Hole, I was thinking 47 sounded pretty darn good!  So, I told Chuck to be on the lookout for bears (half kidding) and I would do what I could do dodge the potholes.

We get a few more miles when we come upon a pickup truck with a guy standing outside of it looking through some binoculars.  We stopped and asked him what he was looking at and he said there had just been (key words here folks, "JUST BEEN") a Grizzly Bear there and some dude on a Honda dirt bike went out chasing it.  A Grizzly Bear?????  Are you kidding me??  So I asked my next intelligent question, "Do you think its safe for us to continue on down this road??"......He said the Grizzly had been standing about 50 yards away from the guy on the bike and didn't seem too concerned with going after him, so he figured we'd be okay.  So I ask him another intelligent question, "Is this a shortcut to Ashton?"  After he finished laughing, he emphatically said, "NO"......we'd be driving all night to get down the 47 miles of unpaved, raw bumpy roads.......that is, if we didn't get eaten by the Grizzly first and that we needed to drive back to Jackson Hole........UGH.........that mean't we had about a 3 hour drive ahead of us.....

So, as we turned the motorcycle around to head back up the road we just came from, we noticed him getting his "bear smell detractor", or whatever they call it,  along with his rifle and heading across the road......Guess he was going to get him a little grizzly......

So, as you can see, we came THIS close to being eaten by a Grizzly Bear!  THIS CLOSE!!!!  Whew......I was glad to be out of that non-enchanted forest.....

As we drove home and the sun was slowly fading away, I was able to snap a few pictures of the beautiful land here in Idaho.....its such a contrast from the land we had seen just a couple hours earlier in Wyoming.....but just as beautiful in its own way.

And poor Murphy; he didn't get to go on this all day journey and couldn't get out of the RV door fast enough once we got home......

He pee'd for a solid 10 minutes......