When we rounded the tunnel bend, wide eyes flashed at us. ( Learn how not to get attacked by a bear.) Then, crawling on forearms and knees, I followed Wes, feeling only slightly more secure knowing that he’d be chomped before me if the bear charged. When black bears hibernate, their breath slows and their body temperature drops by roughly 12 degrees Fahrenheit-low enough to cut their metabolic rate in half, but high enough for them to react to danger. Wes had managed to jab him with the syringe, so we waited for the drug to take effect. The bear they’d collared a year and a half ago now weighed about 350 pounds-and he was awake. Thirty seconds later, they came flying backward out of the tunnel. Armed with an expandable six-foot stick tipped with a tranquilizer syringe, he dived in headfirst. The tunnel was barely wide enough for a person to turn around in, and it kinked to the left, obscuring our view of what lay inside. It narrowed to a dark tunnel, and the musky scent of wild animal steamed from within. Then a curtain of snow collapsed, revealing a sandstone cave. The temperature dropped into the single digits as we poked at the snow, trying to locate the den’s entrance.Ī weak radio signal led us to several empty dens, and as the sun set, we considered turning back. The signal led us up the face of a steep hillside. On a cold and clear day in February, Wes, his brother Jeff, his assistant Jordan, and I were following the GPS coordinates from the bear’s collar up a steep and into a red earth canyon covered in high desert brush and freshly fallen snow. Wes Larson, a wildlife biologist at Brigham Young University who was figuring out how to reduce human-bear conflicts near backcountry campsites, had invited me along for a “little adventure”: We would tranquilize the bear while he was hibernating. Our task was simply to change some batteries.īut the batteries were in a radio collar worn by a male black bear in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. This story appears in the December 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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