I may have had a few encounters :) I spend a ton of time out of doors so I see a lot of animals. The pics at the water hole were all taken from the same jog route on different days. I don't live in that area now but I have a lot of animal encounter photos from jogging, hiking, camping, fishing, hunting etc. over the years and I expect to have many more. If I am out of doors in bear or cougar country I do go armed with a handgun especially if my children are with me. I have never even come close to having to use it but I want it there just in case I need that final option. So here are some pics of everything from deer, to bears, to fish and mountain lions:

Cornbread- Wow! That's quite the watering hole/jogging route. Where is it, BC, MT?  Are those brown bears.....Brown bears? That mountain lion shot is amazing, how close were you??? Were you there or is that a trip camera at the watering hole?

Stories behind the pics:

The first black bear pic was taken along side a road I was hiking on with my boys and that bear was literally 15 feet away and had no idea we were there. It's the biggest black bear I have ever seen in the wild. We were hiking in Montana at the time.

The elk pic was taken in teh mountains outside Yakima Washington with my boys. That elk is actually looking directly at my youngest son(age 7) who was making monkey noises at it.

The fish pic is my youngest son down on the Sandy river. The salmon were spawing in the shallows and I lifted that one out for him with my hands after wading in and slipping up on it unaware.

All the shots at the water hole were taken with my friends Bushnell camera. He uses that as his trip camera as well as his regular one to take pics with when we are jogging. I will look around and see if I can find some that were done on a motion sensor instead of taken in person. I have some from when he set his camera up at that water hole at night because we were seeing so much stuff in the day time in person we decided to try it at night when we weren't around and see what we got. Somewhere I have a pic from those nights of three cougars drinking all at one time. I'll see if I can find it. All those pictures were taken at a remote state park in the mountains in California. My friend is a ranger there and I go jogging with him when I go to visit and we go to this water hole to look and see if there are animals. The brown colored bear is just an enormous female black bear with brown coloration. What you can't see in those photos is she has three cubs in the bushes and was not very happy about us taking her picture. The little burm and the bushes you can hide behind to take the pictures are about 40 yards away. From the trail you can see if there is an animal at the watering hole and then you can back up and sneak up undetected behind those bushes and dirt burm and most of the time they never know you are there. There is a place to rest your camera so you get really clear photos. It is the only water around for miles so it pulls in an amazing amount of animals. Last I heard my buddy was going to set up a motion camera there permanently and see what he could find but I haven't heard yet if he did it or not.

The pic with the giant bull frog is my oldest in an area we often camp at. He caught that while catching tad poles for our home aquarium.

The deer in the trees is outside Elgin Oregon. I was up there winter camping in the snow and took that they day we came out.

OK I found it. Here is the one from the night he set it up as a motion trip cam and got the three cougars at once. He set the camera up right on teh same ledge we use when we sneak up on the animals and zoomed it in before hand so everything would be in focus:

Ran into a Black Bear on the ridge along Murna Point. I was approx. 100 yards from us and took off once we danced around and made some noise.   (early April)

Also this past weekend ran into a "mountain lion" down in southern Oregon, near the Oregon Caves.  (Big Tree Trail).  I turned tail and took off down the snow bank...

-Jason

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"The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others."-Teddy Roosevelt

I've run into a bear with two cubs up at Devils Rest before. Think they must live somewhere near there.

Most of the time bears just run away. Sometimes they ignore you. In those cases it's best just go on about your business. They don't like it if you show too much interest.

What's surprizing is how fast they can move. They can dart around as quick as a dog.

Bears are like people. It's hard to say what they will do.

One of the funniest bear encounters I had was on Mount Defience. I was headed down Starvation Ridge and got into this huge swarm of bees. Then I came upon a bear about ten feet away with his head in a hole. He was fat, almost shaped like a ball. There were bees all over him. He looked up, saw me and bounded off. I went over and looked in the hole where he was digging, a bees nest in the ground. Then I  figured it would be best to get out of there before I got strung.

The bees did not attack me. I think they somehow knew I wasn't the problem, like they had some kind of collective intelligence.

I have encountered BB's many times....over a hundred, easy, not including those many hundreds from inside a vehicle. I have spent a good bit of my life alone in the woods, in primitive camps or in fairly remote living situations.

The most noteworthy "close one" with a BB was while hunting deer about twenty years ago. I was sitting quietly on a stump when an elderly graybeard male BB of about 200# very slowly walked up the trail towards me on all fours, head down. The distance I first noticed him was about 80-100 feet. BB's eyesight is poor but their smell is keen. The wind blew his smell to me, so I don't think he had my scent. He kept coming. I thought I would see how close he would get before he spooked. When he came within 15-20 feet, I stood up and shouldered the rifle. He STILL didn't notice me and kept coming. At about ten feet I cocked the hammer and hissed loudly. That did it. He rose on two legs, shook his head, quickly pivoted around and ran off downhill.

I have had numerous encounters over the years with nuisance BB's coming round my house. In the case of younger bears, they can be difficult to dissuade from returning. Bears can move amazingly fast when they want to, but they are seldom quiet.

Have encountered cougars in the field perhaps a dozen times or so while on foot.

I was stalked by a cougar one time on Green Point Ridge in the Gorge about 25 years ago. It was nearly dark and I turned around to see the cat behind me....at about 75 feet distance. At first, as always it was neat to see a big cat, but as I continued to walk, he continued to follow, keeping about the same distance. If I stopped and turned, he stopped. This went on for probably fifteen minutes (seemed like hours) and he eventually disappeared.

On another occasion, I nearly stepped on a really big male cat on the Salmon River Trail. The cat had been eating a deer-kill just a few feet down slope of the trail. I was walking with no particular effort to remain quiet. I interrupted his breakfast and we were both pretty startled, I suppose. I saw him, he lunged up the slope, not more that three feet from me on the trail and bounded up the hill. That was pretty cool.

Something similar happened in the Bitterroots about the same time but this time the distance was a healthy 30 feet or so. Another interrupted breakfast for the cat. In this case, I was walking down a road alone in early morning and the cat saw me and scaled a rock cliff to get away from me. Amazing agility. When he got to the top, perhaps 75 feet up, he stopped and looked down at me.

I've never had an animal encounter with a bear or cougar or any other predator (other than from the safety of my car), but my coolest animal encounter while hiking was with a moose in Jasper National Park. We were camping in the backcountry, by Jacques Lake, and there was this female moose who came to the lake shore near our camp. She kept sticking her head in the water (looking for food, I imagine?) and then came up DRIPPING. It was quite fascinating and cool, and she seemed not at all disturbed by our presence.

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Cheryl

I ran into this little kitty tonight on a short hike. Also saw a bunch of turkies, but they didn't attack me this time!!

Wow, a bobcat, how wonderful! And be able to get a picture as well. I'm jealous

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“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.”
~John Hope Franklin

We live in a rural area at the foot hills of the Cascades. We get regular viewing of coyotes, bob cats, cougars, elk, deer, bear etc.

Sometimes to close has they have gone after our live stock from time to time.

I am even more envious. I feel lucky just to see the occasional coyote. My condo neighbors don't appreciate them quite as much as I. I keep the cats inside, unfortunately a bit tough to do with your livestock.

 

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“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.”
~John Hope Franklin

We deal with some of the stand out offenders from time to time and it usually settles things down.

I was doing some blade work with the crawler and had coyotes chase our dog right up to the side of a operating D-4 cat. They were so focused on the dog they tuned everything else out. Happened again the next day. They must have had a den in the area is my guess.

 

 

 

   While I've had a lot of animal encounters, my most memorable was about 4 years ago.  It was the summer before my last year of college.  I didn't have a good job for the summer and was intent NOT to simply earn minumum wage for a job I didn't like just to pay the bills.  So I packed up my bag and decided to head to the nearest wilderness area, which happened to be the Selway/Bitterroot area of Idaho.  My plan was to "live off the land" for the summer, taking photos and working on my writing.

   Well, about 9 days into my journey something happened that they say never happens.  While hiking down the trail about 14 miles from trailhead I was bitten by a rattlesnake.  I must have scared the heck out of him for him to get me so well.  I was passing a shaded area of the trail by some running water, and felt something grab at me about the ankle area.  When I looked back there was a 4 and 1/2 foot greenish black northern pacific rattler coiled in the trail.

   To make a long story short, it was over 30 hours before I made it to the emergency room, and by the time I did, when the Dr. took tests, he told me my liver was failing, my kidneys were failing, there was blood in my urine, my blood wasn't coagulating, and my tissues were digesting themselves.  It appears that hiking 14 miles pumping a large dose of rattler venom through your body will do a number on you.  I was lucky to have made it.  Anyway, I was in the hospital for 3 days (it was too late for anitivenom - I just had to ride it out), and bed-ridden for 3 months as my leg turned purple, then black, and then finally began to recover.

   NOT A FUN EXPERIENCE.  To this day when I see a rattler, the thick smell of ferns, like Irish Spring soap comes to me - that was the smell when I was bitten.  Anyway, be careful to avoid this type of encounter!

-Zach

p.s.  If you're wondering, I did kill the snake, and I still have the rattle to this day.  (ten buttons on it!)

Good Grief!! What an experience. I've had to overcome an irrational fear of snakes of any kind, only I've not been able to overcome a terror of rattlesnakes. I'm not sure I would have survived such an experience. I'm very glad you lived to tell about it. I think I'll keep my ankle high boots.