By: Syd Bickers Photo Credit: Mikayla Vosler
Milligan College sophomore John Steadman had no idea he was picking up a late-night snack for a couple of wild bears when he went to a local doughnut shop on the night of Wednesday, Oct. 9.
He planned to pick up a couple dozen doughnuts for the group to eat on their fall break trip to Gatlinburg, Tenn. Steadman ended up leaving the shop with a large trash bag sized sack of day-old doughnuts and various pastries that would later lure the trip’s four-legged entertainment.
Trip members Brandon Banks, Ethan Bourne, Jalen Bridwell, Colin Bumann, Eden Greene, Samantha Lewis, Riley Lis, Steadman and Mikayla Vosler, had never seen a bear in the wild, but that was all about to change.
Before leaving the next morning, Vosler thought it would be funny to give Steadman a 27-gallon storage tub from her dorm room to hold the doughnuts while traveling. The doughnuts filled the tub half full. After eating some of the doughnuts for breakfast, the students packed up and loaded the treat filled tub into the bed of Bourne’s 2002 silver Toyota Tacoma.They secured the tub with a ratchet strap and left campus around 10:30 a.m.
The group had rented a cabin on the outskirts of Gatlinburg to stay in from Thursday, Oct. 10 to Saturday, Oct. 12. The neighborhood that their cabin was in butted up against the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. They couldn’t check in until 4 p.m. on Thursday, and the drive from Milligan College to Sevier County, Tenn., where Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge are, takes a little over two hours. To kill time that afternoon, the group went shopping at the Tanger Outlet Mall in nearby Sevierville, Tenn.
All the while, the halfway filled 27-gallon tub of doughnuts was strapped to the bed of Bourne’s truck absorbing the sun rays and rising in temperature.
“When we got to the cabin at five, [the doughnuts] had been in the back of the truck all day – baking,” said Steadman. “All the glazing was melted…The jelly was secreting out of the little jelly munchkins (doughnut holes).”
He said nobody wanted to eat the pastries after they had been warmed by the sun, so the group left them strapped in the back of the truck and began to get settled in the cabin. While the group was unpacking and checking out the cabin, Steadman wandered onto the second floor balcony that overlooked the cabin’s driveway. He heard something “wrestling around” below. He scanned the ground and spotted a bear. Acting quickly, he ran inside to tell the others.
Once they all got on the balcony, they began to wonder what the bear was doing. Accessing the situation from above, the group noticed the tub was no longer secured in the truck bed. It was in the bear’s possession. Bourne said he believed the bear had climbed into the back of his truck, unstrapped the tub and drug it down a hill and into the woods beside the driveway.
As the students kept gazing upon the bear eating their soggy doughnuts, they noticed that there were two bears. Bumann decided to go out onto the driveway to shoot footage of the bear with his cell phone. He unlocked Vosler’s red 1996 Honda Civic and stood next to it, ready to jump in if the bears began to charge him. After capturing the footage the bears started to move closer to the driveway. Feeling threatened, Bumann ran inside the cabin without locking Vosler’s car.
“When he got inside I said, ‘Colin go lock my car. [Bears] are known to get into your car,’” said Vosler. “He was like, ‘No. They won’t get into your car.’ So I was like, okay, fine. They won’t get into my car. So we went to bed.”
Friday morning Bourne was eating a bowl of cereal on the porch when he realized one of Vosler’s car doors was open. Not knowing that Bumann had left the vehicle unlocked, Bourne went to the porch where Vosler and Greene were. He asked if Vosler remembered leaving the vehicle door open.
“My first reaction was, I am going to kill Colin!” said Vosler.
The women followed Bumann out to the lightly tattered car. They discovered claw marks on the driver’s seat, the ceiling, the passenger door panel, dashboard and visor.
A fresh pumpkin spice air-freshener from Bath and Body Works had been recently attached to the passenger seat visor. The freshener was found torn up in the passenger seat.
“My thought is that the bear was trying to get my pumpkin spice air-freshener,” said Vosler.
In an interview Steadman joked that the bear liked the scent of pumpkin because of its attraction to the freshener and the tub of pastries, which included a few seasonal pumpkin doughnuts.
Great Smoky Mountain National Park Wildlife Biologist Bill Stiver confirmed that the bear most likely entered Vosler’s vehicle in search of the air-freshener.
“[Bears] can smell the most minute things,” he said. “I have caught bears on a single M&M.”
Stiver said the park has had similar situations in which bears try to break and enter vehicles, but he said the occurrence is rare.
“We don’t typically have bears that break into vehicles,” he said. “And quite frankly, we don’t tolerate it.”
Bears that behave in such bold manners around humans are put to death, as their aggression becomes a determent to the animals and humans.
The occurrence of bears breaking into vehicles is higher in Western parks like Yosemite National Park in California. Yosemite rangers will ticket vehicles that have food stored in them. Stiver said it is usually safe for Smoky Mountain National Park visitors to store food in their vehicles. However, storing food outside of a car or building is another story.
Referring to the tub left in the truck bed, Stiver said, “In some sense, what they did was the worst thing they could have done.”
He said the students should have stored the doughnuts inside the cabin. He was surprised that both vehicles were not damaged further.
Bridwell said the bears stealing the doughnuts “definitely made the trip.”
The group saw a woman from a neighboring cabin throwing bacon off her porch. They assumed that she was trying to attract bears in hopes of a sighting.
Though it may be entertaining to watch wild bears from the comfort of a cabin porch, Stiver said these types of encounters are dangerous. He said feeding bears can cause animals to be “food conditioned.” The bears will continue to return to areas in which they find food. If those areas happen to be residential neighborhoods, bears will become more comfortable being in close proximity to humans.
“Most bears will run from the scent of people,” said Stiver, “whereas bears that are food conditioned will approach humans.”
Stiver said bears will most likely return in search of food at night when they feel less threatened. When aggressive bears are identified they must be put to death. Stiver and his department handle bear issues within the National Park, and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency has jurisdiction over bears outside the park, such as those the students saw.
“Bear issues in and around the city of Gatlinburg are nothing new,” said Stiver. He recommended that visitors go to bearwise.info to read about how to handle themselves in bear territory.
Having experienced their first sighting of wild bears, the students packed up and left the morning of Saturday, October 12. Steadman remembered Banks thinking he came within 15 feet of a bear when he took out the trash that morning. Supposedly the bear had it’s back toward him.
When the group drove away from the cabin for the final time they noticed a life-sized wooden statue of a bear at the end of the neighboring cabin’s driveway. The rest of the men on the trip believed that this was what Banks had really seen.
One thing for sure, the break’s bear encounter left the group spooked.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwaqKVkHYJQ&feature=youtu.be
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