(See update at the bottom of the post)

Phew. What a week it’s been. Not only has it been one of those crazy-busy weeks at work, but my parents decided to come to town on Thursday and stay with me through this morning for a weekend of celebrating the Modern Dad’s birthday and watching the local college football team get its collective butt kicked by its rival.

The Modern Dad decided he wanted to mark the anniversary of his birth by going for a day hike in the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park with The Modern Mom, myself and the Modern Dog.

It was a nice, invigorating hike on a pleasant day with a beautiful falls at the end.

Rainbow Falls on a very slow exposure.

But that wasn’t the exciting part.

The exciting part was on the way down. Lucydog, who had been casually trotting along on the trip down, stopping every so often to sniff for critters on the side of the trail, all of a sudden began tugging on her leash as if to say, “OMG, there is something really, really, REALLY exciting up ahead.” We kind of ignored her as we were chatting on about something.

That was, until the tree next to us moved. And we looked up. And we saw a bear. And we screamed. And we hauled ass back up the trail some two dozen feet.

I thought many things about this bear. ‘Cuddly’ was not one of them.

Yes, Virginia, there is a black bear population in the Tennessee mountains. Fortunately the only thing this bear was interested in was keeping its spot on the Rainbow Falls trail and not yielding to the half dozen people that had gotten stacked up trying to get around it.

That doesn’t mean the bear didn’t do its best to scare the everloving daylights out of us. He kept coming up the trail towards us. And in us, I mean my parents who could run away from it and my dog, whom I was certain the bear would want to eat once it figured out that she might make a tasty meal. Fortunately, Lucydog is mostly mute and didn’t bother trying to bark at the bear. She just froze and stared at it, realizing that whatever IT was, IT was bigger than she.

It kept coming towards us slowly, but still fast enough that my heart was beating 10 times as fast as usual. My dad decided to take off away from the trail, through a thickly vegetated area. My mom and I decided to follow suit, but the dog wouldn’t budge. Which meant I ended up having to carry her and her 55 pounds of pure muscle down the side of a thickly vegetated hill. The bear lumbered behind us for a little ways til it realized it was getting away from the trail it had so closely guarded and decided to go back. That’s when I dropped the dog, who regained her ability to run, and moments later we picked up the trail again on a lower switchback.

[Takes a deep breath]

We survived and lived to tell the tail and this time (unlike that time we saw the grizzly in Montana) have photographic evidence. Lucydog keeps reliving the encounter in her dreams and trying to chase the bear away. I’m not sure if she’s caught it yet.

We saw some other wildlife too. We saw a very long, thick black snake AFTER the bear, and it comparatively did not induce any heart palpatations as the bear had done. We saw a wild turkey, some smaller critters and some deer:

The dog, bottom right, making eyes at a deer, top left, and a wild Smoky Mtns. Hiker caught in the crosshairs.

P.S. I should make this point that Anonymous (man, Anonymous sure gets around the internets, doesn’t he/she?) and Mickey have made: Dogs are not allowed on the Rainbow Falls trail at the GSMNP. Unfortunately, we did not realize this until AFTER we had climbed the trail, encountered the bear and returned to base where we saw a hardly visable sign indicating that dogs were prohibited on the trail. I’m sure this should have occured to us before we brought Lucy to the park, but I’m a little bit slow when it comes to realizing these things. (Please don’t make fun of me for that). Of course, I realize now why dogs are prohibited and I’ve been thanking my lucky stars that Lucy is a well-behaved mute dog and the bear wasn’t interested in stirring up trouble. Of course, I didn’t feel nearly as bad when I learned that this dude who was hiking with his family (including young children) and encountered us encountering the bear had a gun in his backpack. I do at least know guns are illegal in national parks.

So, the moral of this story is make sure you check on these things first.