FIRST-EVER YOSEMITE TRIP
(Or The Night of the Bears!)
by Renee Rose Hendry
It was the spring of 1978, and I was a 17-year-old senior student at Sonoma Valley High School. Our advanced biology teacher, Mr. Stoye, had just announced we would go on a camping trip to Yosemite to celebrate the upcoming graduation of the class of 1978. The class had been challenging work, and all the students were excited by the idea of going to Yosemite. I had never been to Yosemite before and had never been camping in all my life.
Many of the students from our biology class, two teachers, and a few chaperone parents set off for Yosemite on a cloudy, gray day in late April 1978. My dad was one of the volunteers to drive us to the park. I was sitting in the front seat of his old pickup truck, as we crested the Highway 140 entrance road into Yosemite Valley. My first view was of sheer-looking granite cliffs that disappeared up into the cloud-covered heights. I then caught a glimpse of waterfalls that seemed to flow straight out of heaven itself!
Our cars were parked a short walk from our group camping site. We had to carry everything from the car, over a small footbridge, to our camp. There were about 20 of us in our group. The first challenge was to set up a tent with multiple poles for which we had no instructions. It took us about two hours of repeated attempts to assemble that tent, with some minor swear words said under our breath.
We had “drawn lots” to take turns cooking dinner for the three nights we would be in Yosemite. My friend, Suzanne, and I had to cook dinner for the first night, which was also my 18th birthday. I officially became an adult in Yosemite! We wanted to celebrate my birthday by providing hot dogs, buns, beans, chips, sodas, and even a large chocolate cake. We had several bags of buns leftover, along with bags of chips, and half the chocolate cake. After we served dinner, Suzanne and I didn’t want to walk all the way back to the parking lot, in the pitch-dark, carrying that large amount of leftover food. We decided to put all the leftover food into our tent when nobody was looking.
Mr. Stoye had warned us to put all our food into the trunk of a car or into a “bear box” way up in a tree, since a bear could show up at any time at our campsite. Of course, being “know-it-all teenagers,” we really didn’t believe there were bears around. We just thought Mr. Stoye was trying to scare us. We spent the rest of the evening listening to ghost stories around the campfire. Someone had brought a guitar, and we sang songs until about 10 pm, then we went to our individual tents to sleep. It was a great 18th birthday celebration for me in spectacular Yosemite!
The borrowed tent we had set up could have fit several of the students, but some of the students had chosen to sleep outside by the warm campfire. Suzanne and I got into our sleeping bags and drifted off to sleep. Sometime around 1 am, I heard a noise in the pitch-dark tent. Suzanne heard the noise also and said, “Renee, I think there is something in the tent!” I grabbed the flashlight near my pillow and shined the light up into the glowing red eyes of a very large raccoon! Of course, when you are laying flat on the floor of a tent, everything looks larger looking up at it! Suzanne and I both screamed “bloody murder,” and the raccoon quickly exited the tent, managing to drag a bag of chips with it. Apparently, the raccoon had used its little fingers to unzip the tent door and had come right in. It was attracted by the smell of the food in the tent we had hidden from our teachers, but it wasn’t hidden from the keen noses of the animals!
Mr. Stoye heard our commotion and came to see what was wrong. Suzanne said,
“Renee, you’d better tell Mr. Stoye about the food in our tent.” I worked up my nerve and said, “Mr. Stoye is it alright if we have a little food in our tent?” Mr. Stoye just about blew an artery in his neck and said: “Absolutely not! You need to take that food right now to put into the trunk of the car!” At one in the morning, on our first night in Yosemite, Suzanne and I came parading out of the tent with five packages of hot-dog buns, a box of cereal, bags of chips, our personal snacks, and half a chocolate cake. Even in the low light of our dying campfire, I could see Mr. Stoye’s eyes “bug out” of their sockets and his face flush red in anger. The three of us walked all that food over the small foot bridge to the parking lot and locked the food into the trunk of one of the cars.
On the way back, there was a large shadow next to our tent. It was a very large black bear! Mr. Stoye said: “You got that food out of your tent just in time. Here come the bears!” I had never seen a bear running free before; I’d only seen bears in a zoo where they were safely separated from me by a fence. A mother bear and two cubs came along next, following the first bear, then another adult bear came to our campsite.
Soon there were five bears circling around the outskirts of the light cast by our newly restocked and blazing fire. We watched them walking around and around the perimeter of our campsite, searching for an easy snack to grab. Mr. Stoye yelled and waved a blanket at the bears to try to scare them away. Even though we were scared, we were so tired at that point that we went back into our tent to sleep. Several fellow students decided they didn’t want to sleep outside anymore with wild bears and joined us inside the tent. Even though a tent is no real protection against a bear, sleeping outside seemed like a worse place to be with bears walking around free in the forest of Yosemite.
Just after dawn, we all came out of our tents to begin cooking breakfast. A bear came running by to take a frying pan from an uncovered storage box. It must have smelled like a past meal. We discovered that a tent had the back ripped open, as a bear had tried to get one piece of hard candy that was stuck to the floor of that tent. I can only imagine what would have happened if the bears had come when we had all that food stored in our tent.
And while we were eating breakfast, a bear boldly ran up and stole a box of cereal right off one of the picnic tables! After breakfast, we all went on a hike to Mirror Lake to see the beautiful reflection of granite cliffs and trees in the water. One of the students slipped on a rock and fell into the lake with a big splash! We all laughed, and even the student thought it was funny. She was afraid to go back to the camp by herself to change without an escort to protect her from bears!
I learned a lot from my biology teacher before graduating in the late spring of 1978 from Sonoma Valley High School. I also learned a lot from my first trip to Yosemite National Park. Yosemite taught me to respect the creatures of the forest, to always follow the rules to protect ourselves from those special creatures while visiting one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and to always ensure your food is locked safely away from all those special forest creatures looking for a “free handout.”