Bear Encounter

This weekend I went to Reno with Steve; he was there on business but we thought it would be a good chance for us to spend some time together. We decided to take a little trip to Lake Tahoe for some sight seeing. We stopped at Harvey's in South Lake Tahoe and had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and then continued around the lake.

Soon we entered the small town of Camp Richardson, we noticed a lot of people and cars parked along the side of the road and so we pulled over and went to see what was going on. As we looked into the water below the bridge this is what we saw

hundreds of Kokanee Salmon were in the stream spawning, it was amazing. I had never seen that many fish at one time. A few moments later someone said look, there's a bear. Sure enough there was a brown bear in the middle of the stream fishing for his dinner. We decided we wanted a closer look and so we took a trail that ran beside the stream. Along the way we encountered a lady that had spotted another bear and so we followed her. Just around the corner was another bear, he was just walking along and we quietly watched. He saw us and looked directly at us, he was probably only 10 yards away. He then turned and lumbered away crossing the path that we were on. It was very exciting. We went back to the creek and watched the other bear fish, he wasn't having much luck so he headed up stream to where the fish were more concentrated. The most frustrating thing was that we didn't have our camera. I found the picture of the Salmon on the Camp Richardson web site and the picture of the bear just depicts what we saw.