Family folklore Melanie Ririe

Bears in the tent!!

All the young woman in my stake go to girls camp every year, we go up to our stakes property and camp there for three days. We’ve gone up to the stakes property every year that it seems like déjà. A new year doesn’t create new memories just old ones repeated. Except for last year.

Last year was like a new dream in the same setting, but this time the dream became a nightmare. We arrived to our camp site Wednesday morning and started to get everything set up, tents, kitchen, and the schedule for the weekend. We had our first meeting in the amphitheater and as usual it was about the rules and regulations, by the time the meeting was over it was dinner time so my ward headed back to our camp site. We cooked the best dinner ever; it tasted so good that my taste buds jumped out of my mouth! The stake leaders called another meeting in the amphitheater, which was confusing because they had already gone over everything like it was the army… or so we thought.

The stake leaders introduced a big tall giant man who looked like he had just go off the couch after watching a soap opera, and was mad because we called to interrupted his TV program. He was wearing a forest rangers uniform, ah oh! Were we too loud, did we pick wild flowers illegally, what did we do wrong? So he goes on and on about how dangerously common bears were in this part of the forest. Wait, what there are bears! Big mean dangerous bears who want to kill us! Pack up the tent I’m out of her.

The ranger went on about all the precautions we have to take with the bears and what to do if you see one, make all the noise possible and don’t run away, when the bear is out of site call the forest ranger. This guy was not convincing at all that the forest rangers could help us he was just some guy asked to talk to the girls’ camp so they wouldn’t freak out.

My ward headed back to Fort 8th ward where the army lived. Tim, my leader’s husband was ahead of all of us and arrived first to find a big brown bear eating our dinner we fixed out of the garbage! “Hey, hey, hey!” was the noise he chose to scare the away the bear. This particular bear was very skittish that “hey, hey, hey!” was all the noise needed to scare it. So we called the ranger, but this time he was already up there so really all we had to do was scream “RANGER!”

Now the situation was not so good, we had hungry bear trying to eat us…and our garbage! We decided to stay up there that night because we just got up there we couldn’t just leave besides the bear was really skittish so he wouldn’t hurt us. We went over one more time what not to do with a bear around… the most important was no food in the tents! That would attract the bear.

The next day we had no bear trouble, but it wasn’t over yet. The rangers had dogs running around trying to find the bear so they could capture it, and we were instructed to get in tents or cars if we see a dog running….. Because the bear might be near by. Ahhhhhhh! Near by? Bear? So that night we met in the amphitheater and preformed our skits. In the middle of our performances a dog came running through, so… we headed to our tents. My ward squished into one big tent and made as much noise as possible, I lost my voice I was being so loud. Then the trouble came, the bears they were in my wards camp site! Not one, no not two bears… three bears! In our camp site! Now these bears were not so skittish like the other bear these bears were in for the food and were not leaving with out some. So we yelled and kicked up dirt and banged poles against the trees, we were so loud you’d think there was an earthquake.

We were not well physically and mentally to stay up their so we just hoped in the cars and left with what we had. We were going up the next day to recover all our other stuff we didn’t in the rush out of there. From this point there were no more bears so the story ends here… but one more thing, when we arrived to clean up our tents and belongings the stake took us over to their tent and showed us the enormous paw prints on them, obviously from the big mean bears in our tents.