Day 27

The majority of us have decided to shuttle the 50 miles through the park so that we can actually have some time on our day of to explore. A few people, including our documentaries Skip, have decided to ride the 50. Since Skip is a tall guy I let him borrow my bike. The drive through the park unveiled some of the most breathtaking scenery that I have ever seen, which including canyon-lined forests, crystal clear rivers and winding roads that blended in perfectly so that they wouldn't encroach on the beauty which they went through. When we got to our campsite we were surprised to see a sign that said, "Caution. Bear encounters frequent in this area." We talked to the camp host and he said that we were in a volunteer site, which is not occupied very often so bears are often passing through. We didn't mind because we had nobody camping anywhere close to us and we had a huge campsite. It was like we were the only people in the park. A few of us quickly got things set up and went to hike up Yosemite Falls. It is a 3.5-mile hike to the top and the entire hike is supposed to take 7 hours round-trip. The top of the falls had one of the most beautiful views of the trip. If you ever want to go and visit some of the nations national parks then I highly recommend Yosemite. After some exploring at the top of the falls we headed back to camp and found out that we had someone new staying in our campsite with us, a black bear. Now this wasn't the stereotypical bear. He had apparently been at the site for the last two hours and according to the people who were there, he had circled the site a few times. When I got there he was breaking fallen trees and looking for bugs about 35 yards to the side of the campsite. We just continued doing things like normal in the campsite and acted like he wasn't there. He didn't seem to mind hanging around us and we didn't mind him hanging around our campsite. We lost track of him for about 30 minutes but after we cooked supper we went to sit on the picnic table and noticed him sleeping in the corner of our campsite about 25 yards from us so we ate our supper and watched him sleep. He popped up after a few minutes and started to walk around the campsite again. I got a good video of him when he was about 15 yards away. He kept getting closer and closer so we started acting big and made some noise. He went into the forest and disappeared so we went and alerted the camp host of his presence. The camp host came and made sure that everything was all right and called the park rangers to let them know about the situation. We cleaned everything good and locked up all the smellables in the bear boxes and headed for bed. Hopefully J.J. the Black Bear won't pay us any more visits.