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Show Russell Jacobs 3 March 2010 Well, about one o'clock in the morning I heard a lot of loud movement around me. It wasn't the sound that you would hear from scampering deer, it wasn't moose terrain or there's no elk and of course, in the Sierras there's a large bear habitat. In every campground, major campground has bear boxes to lock your food in. I thought, well, these are bears. There wasn't just one. It was coming from all around me. I thought, here I am, by myself, I've got who knows how many bears watching me, watching me. My hair stood on end. Every hair follicle, arrector pili muscles contracted and my hair was standing on end everywhere. So the best recourse for bears I knew was to whistle as loud as you could. They do not like the shrill of a high whistle. And I did, I mean, I whistled as loud as I could (laughs), and I could hear them move away. I never. .. this thing's vibrating. Are we okay? MD: It seems okay. RJ: We're almost done anyway. So I never went back to sleep. I was fourteen miles back in. Who knows how many bears were out here? Who knows how many hungry bear were around me? Even though I had dealt with bears before, at least I could see them. I couldn't see them. It was pitch black. I'm in the middle of a woods by myself. So I stayed awake the rest of the night. As soon as it got light enough I packed up all my gear and thinking that my partner probably just somehow didn't make it in, I ended up just hiking back out, back to my truck and I thought, well, two out of three on one trip is pretty good. I got two big classic climbs checked off after a whole year of rehabbing a broken leg. Drove down to my sister's house in Los Angeles. Called my buddy, the friend that I had met. He said, "Yeah, I was there. I was hollering that next morning for you." I probably 18 |
