85. Not Quite So Romantic
My boyfriend and I were camping in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park in Alberta this past summer. On the last night of our stay, as I’m falling asleep, my boyfriend tells me I’ve been pushing him off his side of the air mattress and asks me to give him room. Sounds good, we go to sleep. I wake up to him shoving me and think I’m crowding him by accident, so I move over a little.
He shoves me harder and I’m annoyed now because I already moved and I’m tired so I somewhat loudly say, “I’m moving!” And he grabs be and shushes me. I know something is wrong and am awake right away. He whispers very softly, “Do you hear something?” And right away I hear the unmistakable exhaling huff of a bear right by my head.
My heart is pounding because, at this point, I can hear it sniffing us and huffing—which is not good if you know grizzlies. My boyfriend says we need to get to our truck and I agree, but from what I can hear, the bear is between our tent and truck. Luckily, we have command start and our truck has a very aggressive start, so when my boyfriend started the truck, I heard some crashing through the trees and we both ran to the truck.
We drove a lap around our campground to make sure the bear hadn’t gone into anyone else’s site, but we didn’t see it. We slept in the truck until it was light out and let the wildlife hotline in the area know before we left. We started second-guessing ourselves because this all happened at about 1:30 am, but when we were packing up the tent that next day, we found coarse, brown hair all over the side of the tent where our heads were and on the grill of the truck.
I’ve never been so terrified and full of adrenaline in my life.