Bear Cub in Tree

Shenandoah, VA - EvilGentleman - Sunday, March 5th, 2006 : goo

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During our 1999 tour of the eastern USA, we passed through Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, a place of incredible beauty, although much of it was obscured by haze, and they were suffering a terrible drought at this time. The main road through the park is Skyline Drive, a scenic path down the backbone of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

At one point along the drive, we encountered a traffic jam, and we assumed that there was an accident up ahead. As the traffic moved along though, we soon discovered the reason for the traffic coming to a halt was that there was a black bear cub that was lost and the terrified little creature was up in a tree next to the road, crying something terrible. All the human attention was too much for it, and I really felt so sorry for the cub.

What really amazed me though, was how incredibly stupid some of my fellow tourists can be. Several people had stopped their cars and they had actually gotten out, so they could stand under the bear cub and take pictures. This was so obviously stressing the bear cub to a much worse extent, that I wanted to get out and punch these idiots, but there is no way I would ever be so dumb as to get that close to a bear cub. I know somewhere nearby, there is a very worried mother black bear looking for her cub.

I was still stuck in traffic, so I shot some video out my driver's window of the bear cub, but as soon as there was a gap in the traffic, I dashed through and stopped at the visitor center down the road about a mile. The scene around the cub was not visible from the visitor center, so they had no clue what was going on. As soon as I told some park staff what was going on, they rushed over to handle the situation. I really cannot believe how stupid some people are. At least the park rangers agreed with me, that nobody should interfere with bear cubs, EVER!

Sorry for the poor quality of the images, but I was more concerned with the cub's well-being than I was with the quality of the shot, and as soon as I transfer these 8mm tapes to DVD, I will try to extract frames of the idiots standing underneath the cub.

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