Forest Travel Log: Little Bear Crashes the Party

With this story Forests Ontario begins an occasional series by our staff of adventures in the woods of Ontario, designed to encourage all our readers to explore the beauty that Ontario's vast forests have to offer.

By Peter Kuitenbrouwer

At 3 a.m., when darkness enveloped the interior of Algonquin Park, I awoke to a series of bangs outside my tent. My son lay snoozing peacefully in his sleeping bag next to me. I sat up. "Who the heck is going through the cooler at this time of night?" I wondered. I groggily shuffled over and fussed with the tent zipper.

Every summer, several dads and our sons make a pilgrimage to Algonquin Park. We canoe out to a campground on a lake and spend a few days cooking over a campfire, swatting mosquitos, fishing, lounging on a rock and reading, and bathing in the sparkling azure elixir of Algonquin's glorious lakes.

Each night, religiously, we throw ropes over tree branches and hoist our food bags and coolers into the air, high above the reach of any wildlife. It is always a bit of a struggle, in the dark, to launch our food into a tree, but we always get it done. Except that night three years ago…

Just three of us had made it to one of our favourite camping spots by a big flat rock on Canisbay Lake - my friend Ward, my son and me. The first night, we hoisted Ward's cooler into a tree alright. We had also brought my little cooler containing a few cans of beer; I judged that it had no odour, so it would not attract animals. How wrong I was.

That night at 3 a.m., I finally pulled open the zipper and stepped out into the ink-black campground. I looked over to where I had left my small cooler under a pine tree. There stood a bear. Not a big bear: maybe as tall as a chair. It was bent over the cooler and rustled around.

I did not feel scared; mostly fascinated. I reached back into the tent and shook my son's shoulder. "Hey, wake up! There's a bear outside the tent."

He groaned. "No. I'm good. Well, okay." He got up and looked out. But silence had returned to the campground. The bear had left.

In the morning I looked at my cooler. Bear claw marks punctured three plastic bottles of beer, and they were empty.

A couple of days later we paddled back to where we had left the car. We reported the bear at the ranger's station. "What site did you take?" the park staffer asked, pointing to a map on the wall. We indicated our site. She laughed.

"He hit this site, and this one, and this one, and that one..." she said, pointing to a whole string of campgrounds, that included ours, along the north shore of the lake.

Lesson: if you plan to eat or drink in Algonquin Park, always tie your victuals high in a tree overnight. The bears are skilled at opening coolers, and even at popping a cold one (or three).

Photo: Frits and Peter Kuitenbrouwer in Algonquin Park, 2019.