“From up here,” he said.
“All right!”
I was so excited. I had never seen a wild bear, much less taken a picture of one.
“Stand right here,” I said. “Let’s see if I can get a picture of you and a bear at the same time.”
I really couldn’t. The angles were all wrong. I could see the bear below the catwalk but in a picture there would be no way to tell. I tried sitting on the rail but Twiggy gave me worried looks instead of smiling. The best picture I could get showed a worried Twiggy with the rump of the bear sticking out behind the edge of the catwalk.
“Okay, my turn,” said Twiggy. “I want a picture in the watchtower. Sit on the counter. Here, we want the cache in the picture, too. Okay, turn a little bit.”
He looked past me to the forest below.
“Okay, look at me. Smile. Smile! Come on I want to see it in your eyes. I like happy eyes… Thank you.” He pressed the shutter release. “Do you want to see it?”
“Okay!”
He showed me the picture and then we clicked further to see the picture I took of him.
“Maybe I need to take Photography 101.”
“It might help if I hadn’t been worried about you falling over the rail into the jaws of the bear.”
“Okay, then… let me take a different one. Show the camera how to climb out of a refrigerator shaft.”
The bears were very content to hang around under the watchtower all day. We ate little cupcakes, granola and drank two pints of water we had packed. We lowered the cache back down the shaft on a rope so we wouldn’t have to spend time replacing it on the ground. We could just close the door, snap on the lock and take off quickly for the van. We unlocked the grate. We checked the ground for bears. Time after time they were still there, just quietly laying about in the berry patch. We caught a couple of glimpses of the cubs. I even got a pretty good picture of them. If I was going to continue geocaching I was definitely going to have to get a better camera. And a GPS. Finally, as the light was failing, we couldn’t see any bears. Maybe they had gone to wherever bears go to sleep. We crept down the stairs only to be met by mama bear walking out of the woods toward us.
“This is ridiculous. She isn’t scared of us. Bears are supposed to take off running if you threaten them,” Twiggy said.
“Maybe they are braver when they have cubs.”
“I don’t want to spend the night here. We have no sleeping bags. The windows are open to the elements. It’s summer, but it’s still going to get cold.”
“I’m willing to risk it if you are. Maybe if they see us leaving they’ll let us go.”
“Do you have any experience with bears?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. But I’ve seen online videos of bear encounters.”
“Yup, they always run away.”
“Except for that one guy who got mauled and ended up losing his leg.”
“It wasn’t this bear that did it. The rangers got that bear.”
“So…”
We crept down the stairs again. Twiggy insisted on going first. He stood there in a fighting stance daring the bear to come close.
“What do you think?” he whispered. “Are they gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever you do, don’t run toward the van. The tower is better protection.”
“Right.”
We walked toward the trail gawking around like two little kids in a haunted house. The light was dim and we really only decided to try the trail because we thought the bear had gone home and we had the head lamp. We just passed the first bushes and had started to relax when there was a snuff and a whuff from the brush and we both jumped and dashed back to the lookout tower. Twiggy was nice enough to let me jump over the gate first and we stopped at the grate huffing and puffing. It was twice as heavy this time and we ended up back in the office room sitting there collecting our thoughts and giving our confidence the little boost it needed to spend a night in the tower.
“So, which side of the bed do you want this time?” Twiggy asked.
“The linoleum. The wood is too hard.”
“You got it. Gabby… I’m sorry I got you into this. If you would rather I take you home…”
“No! No. I want to keep going. I don’t know how we can ever win the contest only finding one cache a day, but I do want to try. If I go home I’ll read books and listen to music and wish I could be doing something outside. But there won’t be anywhere to go and… here there is. There is always somewhere to go and something to do. I saw a bear today! That is so cool! And I found tiny dragon houses in the tree roots. I was really hoping for a shower but seeing a bear was worth it. I can’t wait to see what we find next!”
We ended up spooning that night. We started out just laying there side by side, shivering in the night. Tired and hungry but unable to sleep, we finally found a little warmth curling up together. Twiggy was surprised, but grateful, when I finally scooted over and he put his arms around me trying to conserve the little bit of warmth we had. We woke up often, still shivering. One of the times I woke up in the night I could hear howling in the distance.
“Can you hear that?” I whispered in case he was asleep.
“Coyotes,” he said.
“Or wolves?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen either in these mountains.”
“Maybe I do want to be a forest ranger after all.”
Dawn colored the sky very early in the morning atop the mountain. I had bed head again and no mirror or brush to help my attempts at taming it.
“It’s not bed head if you sleep on the floor. Then it’s floor head.”
“We’re lucky we got chased back. We almost left without locking up the cache again.”
“Oh yeah.”
We took a look around the watchtower and didn’t see bears anywhere so we descended the stairs once more and checked on the cache before locking it up safe and sound.
“Take a picture of the tower so we will remember it always,” I said as we found the trail again. He turned around and lined up the camera for the picture.
“You too,” he said. “Stand next to that rock and you’ll be framed right.”
And so we had our second adventure captured in pixels, and we hiked down the mountain to the awful green van. Home sweet home.
“That thing is so ugly,” I said as we approached it. “But it sure is good to see it again.”
“I agree one hundred percent.”
“What do geocachers call their cars?”
“Usually geomobiles or cachemobiles.”
“With this avocado green van I think it looks more like guacamole than a cachemobile. Maybe it’s a cacheamolé.”
“I don’t know, but it’s the pits,” he joked.
“There’s enough dirt in it to grow an avocado tree.”
“I’m starving and talking about Mexican food isn’t helping. Let’s go eat.”
“It’s a deal.”
We were so hungry that I didn’t even think about my hair. I don’t know what the other