Many years ago, we were part of a group camping in the Pisgah National Forest, just off the Parkway between Asheville and the Smokies. It was early evening and we were gathered at one campsite. Someone just joined the group and said, "Loren, there is a bear in your campsite." I said "I'll go chase it away." I remembered that I had failed to put our ice chest in the car trunk after our dinner. So I dashed back and then - Whoa! The black bear was over three feet high at the shoulder and was methodically going about the task of opening my ice chest. Wisdom prevailed. I just watched as the ice chest was opened and the bear slowly ate our next morning's breakfast, then finally ambled off into the brush. We kept the ice chest for a long time just to show off the tooth marks.

In 1995 we were driving back from Alaska and stopped in northern British Columbia at, I believe, Bijoux Falls Provincial Park. We hiked for about a mile over a wide, well graded and well populated trail to the falls which were indeed spectacular. After returning to Seven Devils we read a story in the Winston Salem Journal about a bear attack on that trail. A black bear attacked and killed a mother, her two children, and a man who had run to their rescue!

We stopped in Yellowstone on our way home from that trip. We heard that a meadow several miles from our campsite was a good place to be at dusk to watch moose coming to feed. So we packed our stove and dinner materials and drove to a small picnic area next to the meadow. We set up at a picnic table, nodded to a couple at the other table about 75 feet away and started preparing dinner. A few minutes later we heard shouting, turned around and saw the couple back on the road shouting and waving their arms. The we looked at their picnic table and saw there was a grizzly bear eating their dinner. Fortunately, they had left enough to keep him occupied while we hastily moved our dinner and stove back into our vehicle.

Our closest encounter with a Seven Devils bear was several years ago when we discovered bear tracks on our deck following a late spring snow.

I have to add to this that on one of the trips to the Seven Devils house after my our dad died, we discovered one of the local bears realized we had not taken the trash out. The door to the shed was pretty neatly ripped open (still on it's hinges, but the latch was dangling) and the trash was spread around the porch. -David