A bear in the desert

Winter is here, at least for the moment. The desert trip from last weekend seems like a distant memory.

"They" say that we'll have 10-20" of white stuff on the ground by tomorrow evening.

I'll ignore the snow for a moment and, instead, I'll remember the warm sun on my bare arms and legs as I relaxed in the desert.

The area where we visited has a maze of beautiful singletrack trails that wend among cliffs and canyons. It was gratifying to see how much K has improved since we visited this desert oasis last May. On that visit, her paw was still weak from the toe amputation, and her activity was severely limited. Not this time. She ran each day, and even played wildly with a young pup named Bubba who we met.

K got a serious case of the zoomies as she, R, and Bubba chased each other in the desert grass at sunset. Even after that wild flurry of play, K's paw didn't get sore. Yahoo!

Some of my bike rides were too long for a dog to come along. On one, I started before anyone else had been on the trails. The trails consisted of firm sand, perfect for tracking. I immediately dropped my bike and started cataloging the animals, including lizards, kangaroo rats, coyotes, snakes, a bobcat, and a BEAR!

When I spotted the bear tracks, I immediately swerved to avoid messing them up with my tire tracks, and stopped to check that they were truly bear tracks. Bears don't usually hang out in the desert. And, this particular slice of desert was penned in by the Colorado River on one side and Interstate 70 on the other side. It seemed like a very unlikely place for a bear to be ambling on the trails.

You can see three bear tracks in the photo below. One is near the very bottom of the photo, one is in the middle, and another is near the top.

The bear tracks were fairly large.The Gu container in the photo below was 4.25" long, and the hind foot track was about twice that. That makes me think that it was a fairly big bear. He was heading toward the Colorado River. Swimming the river would have landed him in suitable bear territory. I wonder if that's what he did? It looked like a tough swim to me.

At first, I thought that he might be eating acorns from the scrub oak that grew in the washes of the desert. The oak had gorgeous red leaves but the acorns were gone.

After a quarter mile or so, the bear headed straight up a rock cliff so I stopped tracking him and headed out toward the river. I followed a beautifully constructed trail that paralleled the contours of the cliffs above the river.

You can see the green and yellow trees lining the river in the distance in the photo below. The trail followed a much less direct route than the river, winding along curvy cliffs.

As I rode, my eyes constantly sought the beauty of the river and the autumn colors along side it. Can you visualize a bear swimming across that wide but calm river? I'm told that a bear probably can do it but I find it hard to visualize.

The beauty of our world never stops astounding me.