16 hours of Hunting

12 hours of highway driving

One 4.6 earthquake

No bears sighted

Now don’t get me wrong.  the Bears are there.  they just weren’t moving during the day.  We saw bear sign and where they had been feeding in the Blackberries.  I just never got a visual of a bear as I crept along the miles of logging roads in Del Norte and Humboldt County.  The thick trees and brush obscured any vision off of the roads, and the steep mountainsides actually made me glad that i didn’t kill a bear and have to retrieve 200 lbs. of meat and hide.

Here is what I did see

The Pacific Ocean is just the other side of that last ridge.  We could hear the surf.  That is Fog Below us while scouting the day before.

This was my view for most of the day as I crept along looking for bears feeding in the berries.  That haze is a mixture of smoke from wildfires to the east, and fog from the ocean to the west.  This vista was the most open of any of the ground I hunted.

The berries had been fed on by bears.  In fact they looked as if a truck had driven through them.  Below is a typical patch of berries. 

That’s a bear trail leading through the middle of it.

Here is indisputable truth that the bears were indeed feeding on berries.  This pile was damp in the morning.  I took the picture in the afternoon.

So now I will look forward to an out of state elk hunt as my next big trip.  Who knows, maybe I will have a impromptu hunt before that.