Travel Tip: Watch for bears.

At Shenandoah National Park, there are pictures of bears and warnings about bears and information about how to keep your food away from bears. These bits of information are everywhere.

Somehow, I still didn’t expect to actually see a black bear. Kristina and I were on the Ancient Volcano Ranger led hike (which I highly recommend!), when right near the trail is a juvenile black bear! Everyone on the hike stopped and watched the bear.

Not my picture, but this one was cuter.

The bear was just chilling and doing bear stuff when he decided we were too close to his territory and started to charge us! Luckily Superhero/Park Ranger Bob was there. He did the professional, park ranger thing, and stepped forward, clapped really loudly, and yelled at the bear.

The bear turned around and walked away. He did not run away, or even go very far. This bear had some attitude. He just turned around and moved to a distance he deemed safe. And stared at us until we left.

All of the deer got this close

Shenandoah is absolutely beautiful though. The hiking trails were great! There were several to choose from—short hikes, long hikes, ranger led, or self-directed. And the campgrounds were really nice. There were hot showers and washing machines (quarter operated) at the front of the park and bathrooms and water faucets spread throughout the campgrounds.

We managed to camp next to the coolest people, too. A family from Berlin was camping right across from us. They needed a bottle opener. Kristina happened to have one on her pocket knife. They were incredibly thankful, so they invited us over to roast marshmallows! We had the greatest time. They had never visited Arkansas, so they were curious about our culture. We had never been to Germany, so we were curious about theirs.

We also met a hiker named Muddy Paws! She saw my bumper stickers (if you don’t know, they’re pretty liberal) and thought we seemed like we’d be cool. She works for the Department of Energy. She likes to hike 15+ miles a day because it’s less stressful than her job. There’s a whole hiker subculture built on trust-they’ll share campsites with people they just met and only know by their trail names. It was interesting for sure.

Shameless hiking selfies.

I guess that’s something cool about camping. You can meet bears and cool people in the same day.