A Comedy of Bear-ors

A Comedy of Bear-ors
Anxious for our third waterfall adventure in the Ozarks, like moths buzzing a porch light, Melissa and I decided to brave the recent June heat. Before stumbling across the threshold back into our air-conditioned home two days later, the trip would prove miserable, fun, hazardous, and fortuitous.

Is This a Day Spa?
After a late Friday start, we arrived well after dark at the Redding Recreation Area, a pleasant campground in a bend of the Mulberry River near Cass, AR. The heat and humidity were stifling as we set up our tent and climbed in for a nice sauna experience. The rowdy drunks on the other end of the campground rounded off the fun. I'm pretty sure we heard the smoke monster from LOST outside our tent in the middle of the night, loudly cracking branches as it went.

Breaking Breakfast
We roused early the next morning, peeled ourselves from our bedding and smeared on our hiking clothes. Cooking a campfire breakfast is typically a gratifying experience for us, but on this oppressively airless morning, everything seemed to go wrong. We are normally well-prepared, but in our haste, I forgot newspaper to help start the fire. Of course, we also forgot paper towels. Melissa tried using dry ice for the first time in our ice chest, and several of the eggs had exploded. Most of the rest were frozen. Oops, no butter either. I'm sure we forgot something else as well, but right now I can't recall...

A Blow to My Pyromaniac Pride
I am typically a crackerjack camp side pyromaniac, confidently mocking the "bubbas" who unsuccessfully try to light logs one quart of gasoline at a time, filling the surrounding forest with a sudden roar and a bright orange "Lord-of-the-Flies" glow that soon retreats back to a whimpering smoke plume, while my own, carefully-plotted blaze starts small and builds to a crescendo atop a beautiful bed of glowing embers.

But on this morning the oppressive, motionless air, combined with and my ill-conceived attempt to build the small fire directly under the iron CCC cooking pit grate, resulted in an oxygen-starved smolder that barely got any hotter than the surface of my forehead. I resorted to the bubba method (though I kept my shirt on), repeatedly squirting lighter fluid on the fire, but the rarely-used-and-therefore-old-and-brittle plastic bottle cracked down the side creating a double spew with every squeeze. Of course, it didn't really help, and the irony swarmed though my brain like the mosquitoes in our camp site. Wounded, but determined, I would not give up. The coffee never perked, but I managed to keep the invalid fire going by blowing on it as continually as I could without passing out, and were were able to cook the bacon and a few frozen eggs, which we enjoyed with our unbuttered "toast" and the aroma of sweat and smoke.

Blackberry Delight
Nourished, we set out to find Train Trestle Falls, supposedly a "medium" 3-mile roundtrip along a section of the Ozark Highlands Trail, accessible by a semi-remote trailhead. We didn't get far before we encountered patches of ripening wild blackberries. Very tasty, indeed. But the blackberry bushes quickly got thicker and the medium hike became a difficult bushwhack. Every yard of progress seemed to require two or three hard swings of my walking stick to knock down the thorny growth over the trail.

The heat was sweltering, even in the shade. The gnats and mosquitoes were unbearable. The going slow and tough. But we persisted. Oddly, one of our two bottles of water tasted really awful, and we realized that the CO2 from the dry ice in our ice chest had "contaminated" it. Leaving the cap open for a while let the CO2 escape and the water's natural taste slowly returned.

Apparently, with the vegetation so thick, we missed a turn described in Tim Ernst's book that should have led us off the main trail and right up to the lower side of the falls on a mile detour. Thus, when we arrived at the falls, we were directly above it with no apparent safe way down and no good view. Exhausted and overheated, we gave up and began the hike back, Melissa in the lead.

Black Bear Delight
CRUNCH! We stopped cold in our tracks at the loud sound that came from above us on our left. Looking up, I see a black bear cub shimmying up a tree 120 feet away. There beside the tree is an adult, who seems fixated on us for some strange reason.

"It's bears. What do we do?," I say, still frozen. We discuss it calmly. We're supposed to make noise, don't stare at them directly, don't turn and run, back away slowly. So I start backing away slowly, but Nature Girl Melissa is having none of that. She stands her ground, confidently unafraid. "We have to go this way to get back," she says, pointing at the trail before us. Another bear cub (we think) calls out in distress from further up the trail on the left. I'm thinking "Let's just do whatever it takes to go around them." Unbeknownst to me at the time, Melissa has also seen an adult bear move quickly down the hillside from our left and cross the trail about 60 feet in front of us.

Meanwhile, I'm digging in my pockets and backpack for any available weapons. I have a Leatherman with a two-inch blade and a slippery handle, and my hands are drenched in sweat. As I extend the blade and grip the stainless steel handle, I briefly imagine trying to plunge the ungrippable knife into an attacking bear but instead slicing my hand open. Walking stick in one hand and Leatherman in the other, I wait.

Suddenly, the cub scrambles nervously back down the tree and moves away from us, up the hill. Even though we cannot see them in the thick underbrush, we hear other noises that suggest the bears are retreating. After a few more minutes the decision is made to move forward. I take the lead and we start moving slowly while talking loudly. I was scared to death! Melissa was totally cool. No fair.

About 30 feet along, while passing by some very thick vegetation crowding the trail on the left, we hear two quick and threatening grunts from an adult bear that, while unseen, is obviously less than 10 feet from us, warning us to back off. We did not stop to take a picture. If I wet my pants a little, I'll never know because I was so soaked in sweat. We kept moving and making noise. I brandished my flimsy walking stick with faux bravado. A hundred yards later we started to relax a little, though our senses remained heightened all the way back to the car.

Summer Hiatus
The remainder of the trip was far less adventurous, and my next few fires almost burnt a hole in the ground. The heat remained unbearable, though, and we determined to wait for fall before undertaking any more waterfall adventures. Until then! Fritz