Jody invited us to go camping up at Ice House Reservoir, near Placerville.\u00a0 We borrowed a tent and headed up.\u00a0 Despite the threatening weather (thunder and lightning), the weather turned out to be great.\u00a0 We tried to do a little fishing, but the recent hot weather apparently drove the fish down to the bottom of the lake.<\/p>\n
We stopped on the way out and grabbed some linguica, potatoes and onions.\u00a0 The built a nice fire and threw our cast iron skillet on top.\u00a0 The food was great, and beat anything you get out of a camping package.\u00a0 Full and happy, we sat back, at some smores and drank some beer.\u00a0 I finally realized why people go camping, and lamented the fact that Tahoe is so close, and we have never gone before this.<\/p>\n
After hanging out until around midnight, we finally packed all our food into the coolers, piled them on the tables and headed to our respective tents.\u00a0 About 30 minutes later we are just about asleep, and we hear the cooler fall off the picnic table.\u00a0 “Must be racoons,” I comment to Allison, and then her cell phone rings.\u00a0 Because of the poor cell reception, we can hardly hear her, but we finally understand the following, “There’s a BEAR outside my tent!” Aaaaaaahhhhh!\u00a0 Definetly not racoons.\u00a0 Allison and I start making noise, clapping and hollering as we put our shoes on.\u00a0 We unzip the tent and I poke my head out and look up the path and standing there staring at me is a full grown bear.\u00a0 I’m not sure what the ‘appropriate action’ is when dealing with a bear, but some more hollering and clapping finally convinced the bear to move on to other campsites.\u00a0 And since we knew we weren’t going to sleep, and we were only an hour from home, we decide to grab everything and head for home.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, cooking greasy food and leaving it sitting next to our campsite was foolish, and we all should have known better.\u00a0 There were no warning signs around the campsites, and no bear boxes.\u00a0 Next time we will be eating\u00a0 the backpacking meals and storing all our leftovers far from camp.\u00a0 I expect that I’ll never see a bear that close again, but I’d rather play it safe.\u00a0 I don’t actually think that we were in imminent danger, but I believe in the unpredictability of wild animals.\u00a0 And I don’t need to end up like the guy who got mauled by a bear at Ice House 30 days before we were there.<\/p>\n\n\t\t