I Have a Thing For Bears….

I have a thing for bears. I am not exactly sure how it started. Maybe when I was at Rocky Ridge Music Camp at the foot of Longs Peak in 1970, and I met a juvenile Black Bear in the dark one night as I was sneaking from my cabin to another friend’s cabin. As I passed the garbage dumpster, the bear and I got a good look at each other…..seemed to last forever….then he crashed into the underbrush and I ran in the opposite direction. My first up close bear encounter.

Maybe  it really started when my oldest son transferred to Bear Creek Elementary in 1996, and I offered to illustrate the cover of the Bear Creek  Yearbook. During those years I would drop off my son at school, then go hiking up the hill, and would often see bears foraging along the trail as they attempted to fatten up for the Winter hibernation. The creek and the school were named for the bears roaming those foothills.

For many years I took my kids to the Denver Zoo, and the Grizzly Bears and Polar Bears were a required stop. In the 1990s we had polar bear cubs Klondike and Snow as resident furry celebrities.  During these years I was inspired by the artwork of Barbara Stone, who had a Polar Bear Gallery on Main Street in Longmont Colorado. In the 2000’s we graduated to visiting the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, run by Pat Craig and his staff. I became involved with fundraising for this carnivore rescue facility, with Lions, Tigers and BEARS.

After dreaming about Polar Bears for years, I went up to Churchill in Manitoba, to photograph these iconic Arctic bears in their habitat. After 6 trips to Churchill (3 of which were tours which I organized) I found that I was documenting the demise of the polar bears and their habitat.

On my first few trips I had some startling up-close encounters with the polar bears – at a safe elevated distance in the Polar Rover – traveling with Natural Habitats. On my first trip I captured this big fellow who woke up from his nap and raised his head to gaze at us.

This photo was the reference for my “Polar Bear Eclipsed” art quilt, which was made for the Endangered Species exhibit, which is still traveling today. Notice the skulls in the grass. The names of toxic chemicals found in bear carcasses, are stitched into the grass at the bottom of the quilt.

More  recently (during the pandemic) I painted a life size bear figure with a map of the world, for an outdoor public art exhibit at Chautauqua Park which is in the shadow of the Boulder Flatirons. The bear was auctioned off to raise money for those who lost their homes in the Marshall Fire on December 30, 2021…when 1100 homes burned in a few hours.

My 2 trips to photograph the Brown Bears in Alaska (during the pandemic years) have also resulted in some exciting close encounters with these amazing creatures. Brown Bears are Grizzly Bears that are fattened up on a diet of rich Salmon, and really don’t care much about humans when the salmon run is happening in the Alaskan rivers.  That’s how I came to spend an afternoon with a napping mother bear and her 3 playful cubs on a little islet in the middle of a shallow river in Katmai National Park….but that’s another story for next time.