Ok, so in my last Montana Adventure post I promised that I would elaborate on our run in with stupidity and the wilderness. Its something I am passionate about, stupid people that is, and honestly I agree with comedian Bill Engvall when he says that we should give stupid people a sign to warn the rest of us that we are in the company of stupidity and ignorance.

So… as I was saying… on our last trip into Yellowstone we came across a lone male black bear. To make a long story short (you can read about it in Montana Adventures Part Three) this little black bear made his way to the side of the road. When I say side of the road I mean, he was so close to our car that I couldn’t take a picture with my larger lens because he was too close. My lens wouldn’t focus! Well by this point a “bear jam” had ensued and people were everywhere, including off to the side of the road with the bear outside of their cars with less then 10 feet between them and a hungry male black bear. When the bear would move so would they. Even worse, the stupid adults were allowing their impressionable children to get even closer to the bear then they were! This is where I need to freeze for a moment and explain some things.

Ok, so I can understand that people new to visiting Yellowstone might not know some of the rules when it comes to animals, but who in their right mind gets less then 10 feet away from an animal that has razor sharp teeth and claws that can pull apart logs??!! With that in mind, visitors to Yellowstone are warned. When a visitor enters the park, they are given a newsletter that contains important information about animals, camping, etc. If you click the link below and scroll to page 2, the information is made very visible. Please note that the link is to a PDF formatted document.

http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/upload/yt09sum_mod.pdf

STAY 100 FEET FROM BEARS AND WOLVES. There it is in plain English! If a visitor cannot read English, these news letters are available in more then 40 different languages.

Now I am not a mathematician nor am I great at math for that matter, but I know that 100 yards is not the equivalent to 10 feet! The realistic conversion is 100 yards = 300 feet! Now if I remember correctly most of those people were missing about 290 feet of distance between where they were standing and that black bear. Knowing this, Jillian and I began to inform those people who were too close of what they were doing and that they should back up or get into their cars. A few people genuinely did not realize that they shouldn’t be this close and backed off, while a good portion of them just started at us and continued to move closer. Talking loudly, circling him and getting closer to an animal that is feverishly eating after a long hibernation! The best was listening to one of the children of these idiots yelling back at us that bears could “kill and eat a human”… well yeah!!!

I think what bothers me the most about all of this is that if that bear were to suddenly attack because it felt threatened or cornered and hurt someone, that bear would be destroyed. It bothers me and saddens me that a beautiful animal would have to die because people cannot follow or refuse to follow simple rules. Unfortunately this happens all the time and its not often that people learn a lesson. Luckily this time around, the black bear was too concerned with the shrubs and grubs to care about all of the people nearby. But this isn’t always the case and an innocent animal has to pay for it.

To continue my point of the general ignorance and stupidity out there, here are several questions that rangers in Yellowstone and Glacier have been asked by visitors… this is not a joke….