Today I took a bike ride with a friend on my lunch break. We stuck mainly to a class 2 and class 3 road, although we did a little off-roading on a newly-cut driveway (still very fresh). It was great to get out on my bike on my lunch break, something I haven’t done in years.
While we were returning, on the steepest part of our uphill climb, I heard a loud noise to our left. I looked and saw not one, but three bear cubs between 30-40 feet from us. They were running on what appeared to be an intercept course, so I yelled for us to stop. Fortunately, said bears were running toward the nearest pine trees, which they scaled with amazing speed! Once I realized they were cubs, and they weren’t a threat, we moved as fast as we could to get out of there, just in case mama bear was around. Given that thought, the rest of the hill went down pretty quickly!
This is not the first time I’ve encountered bears while biking, but they were definitely a lot closer to civilization this time. It makes me a bit scared, as I don’t like thinking that they need to be coming this close to humans for food. Hopefully they were just kids getting into trouble without mama’s permission.
The personal blog of Peter Nikolaidis