Re: [pct-l] Grizzly

["Karen Elder" <bluesky@rt66.com>]

:Griz in the San Juans? Rumor or otherwise, I'm glad to hear about this. And
:I'm particularly glad to hear about this _after_ having completed the
:Colorado Trail last summer. Knowing this then would likely have interfered
:with sleep (and changed lazy cooking habits). Knowing this now means I can
:claim to have journeyed a fearsome country with nary a heart palpitation.
:)
:Honestly though, I hope there's truth to the rumor. But perhaps better for
:all that the truth remain elusive.

And everybody laughed at us for hanging our food on the CT!!  :-)

About two months after completing the Colorado Trail this summer, I went to
a writers' conference in Telluride, CO, where one of the speakers was David
Petersen, an "outdoorsman" who lives and writes near Durango, CO. At the
conference I bought his book "Ghost Grizzlies", about the question of the
continued existence of grizzlies in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern
Colorado.

I haven't read the book yet, so I don't know what his final conclusion is,
but here's the blurb from the back cover:
"Deep in the wilds of Colorado's San Juan Mountains there may still lurk a
remnant population of the continent's most fearsome mammal: Ursus arctos
horribilis.
By 1952 it was widely assumed that the grizzly had been extirpated from
Colorado. That is, until one September evening in 1979 when a hunting
outfitter named Ed Wiseman was attacked by a four-hundred-pound
golden-haired sow. The mauled but alive man (and the dead bear) confirmed
what knowledgeable San Juan residents already knew: the colorado grizzly was
no ghost.
What has happened since that encounter almost twenty years ago is the
subject of this story about the bear and our own species in the wild--and
what the future may hold."

Original copyright was 1995, and he did a revision in 1998. Maybe I'll just
hang up the modem here and start reading...

Karen


* From the Pacific Crest Trail Email List |  http://www.backcountry.net   *

==============================================================================