Lassen Volcanic: Close Encounters of the Bearish Kind

Up until this morning, the total sum of my experiences with the fauna of the Northwest United States on this trip consisted of a marmot, squirrel, and a chipmunk; a herd of elk; a deer; some bison, and a roly-poly mama black bear and two cubs.

However, all of these were sort of discounted, in my cynical Easterner's mind. For instance, the marmot and chipmunk were rather cute and no threat. The squirrel? Well, we have a lot of them in New Jersey. The herd of elk was way off in a meadow – hardly something in which one would take more than a passing interest. The bison in Yellowstone – big, impressively scruffy – but seemed all too often to be playing to the cameras. They rolled around in the grass at the side of the road, huffing and snorting, and causing a traffic jam of some twenty cars at a time, all the while posing for the audience. The black mama bear with her cubs also feigned shyness on the bank above the road, as forty to fifty cameras whirred and clicked to immortalize every move. Park rangers were even out there directing traffic.

No, these were not true wilderness encounters, to my mind. But they would do, certainly. After all, who really WANTS to run into any of those larger species in the middle of nowhere? Certainly not me. I didn't even feel comfortable straying very far from the safety of my car when I jumped out to take a photo of a scenic vista .... from the side of the road.

Today, however, in Lassen Volcanic National Park, I had my first real encounter with Ursa Major. Actually, it was an Ursa Horribilis (Ursa = bear; Horribilis = grizzly). They say that the last Grizzly in California was shot and killed in 1922. But you can't convince me of that after today.

Lassen is a strange place. It is the only national park in the United States that is the site of what is still considered an “active” volcano. Its last series of eruptions occurred in 1914 - 1917. The landscape in the Devastated Zone, which suffered the greatest damage from mudflows, lava, and debris, is otherworldly, even now – almost 100 years later. There are bare areas of granular pumice. Areas completely covered with jagged rocks that look like rip-rap provided by some quarry for road construction. Grassy areas where boulders as big as a small cabin landed after exploding out of the crater.

In other places, however, the mountain boasts verdant meadows and tall stands of ponderosa pines, firs, and other evergreen trees. It's spring there, even though it's the middle of July. Tender green shoots of wetlands plants are still less than a foot high, growing in and around soggy drainage streams from the remaining snow drifts. The first wildflowers are starting to appear along the margins of the roads. And in the midst of all this beauty, there are few people to intrude on one's reveries, as Lassen is one of the least-visited of all the national parks.

I was enjoying just such a moment of peace and solitude, puttering along at about 20 miles an hour through a particularly beautiful stretch, when a huge golden-brown hulk bounded from the right bank of the road about 30 feet in front of my car. 1000 pounds of pure bear-flesh was galloping faster than I would have thought possible towards the other side of the road, obviously focused on something more interesting than me. He paused just long enough to throw a startled glance in my direction, as if to say, “Don't even think about coming near me with that thing [my car].” Needless to say, I didn't.

Now THAT is what I call wildlife! Just close enough ... and far away enough ... for me.