Bears in Riding Mountain National Park
Triumph Through Adversity
If you’ve been following along with my blog recently, you’re going to start to notice a bit of a recurring theme. 2022 has certainly been a challenging time to be a nature photographer. It has been even more difficult for me since I’ve been making an effort to take a more professional approach with my photography this year.
Why do I bring it up again? Well last week looking towards May long weekend, the weather was looking pretty poor. My plan was to head up Riding Mountain National Park to look for bears. This is ordinarily the time of year where it's pretty difficult to not see bears in the park.
Let’s keep in mind though that only three weeks ago, Onanole got 82 cm of snow in the first of two or three successive Colorado lows just hammering the park with precipitation. In the week ahead, I called the park to inquire about the bear activity. I was told that the bears really hadn’t come out yet since the dandelions, one of their main spring food sources, haven’t come up yet.
To top it off, due to the aforementioned precipitation, every single trail in the park was closed, as well as both Lake Audy Road and Highway 19. The only road in the park that was open was Highway 10.
When I saw that there was actually snow forecasted for the Friday, I canceled my plans to go. On the Thursday before, I looked at the weather again and the forecast had cleared up and made the last minute decision to proceed with my original plan.
Arriving In The Park
It was very cold arriving in the park. There was still a lot of ice out on the lake. It snowed overnight leaving a light dusting on the ground Saturday morning. I didn’t wake up for sunrise. It is generally better lighting for photography, but the forecast was still showing clouds and I wanted to give room for the snow to finish.
The first bear of the day was a beautiful cinnamon coloured black bear. I didn’t spend much time with him as he was just eating grass along the side of the road.
Continuing along the road which was the only road, I came across a mother bear with cub, both up in a tree eating catkins.
Duck, Duck… Duck?
With nowhere else to go, I headed outside the park. I’ll touch on Proven Lake in a separate post as part of my WMA project. I will mention here that the trip did not go fowl, and it turned out to be a nice way to spend the afternoon.
Eared Grebe
Playful Cubs
Sunday morning was a lot more fruitful! The weather had improved dramatically. The sun was out. The temperature was rising. I hadn’t gotten far before I came across a mother chomping away on grass with two cubs playing in the tree nearby. The cubs were scrambling up and down the tree, occasionally coming down to wrestle in the grass, running around, just bruning energy.
After watching for a while, I drove up and down the park a bit, coming back to the same spot an hour later only to find momma bear passed out slumping against a tree with the cubs nowhere to be seen. I snapped a few poses of her, but it was clear I wouldn’t see much action and started for home. I saw another mom and three cubs but they were quite far off the road.
Despite my intense hesitation to even go, I ended up with so many amazing pictures and the experience of watching a nature documentary in real life. There are so many photos to go through and edit that I will end up publishing another album later on.
