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Adding A Little Excitement — Description
So, we stopped at a rest stop at Summerland, on Okanagan Lake, and a park attendent there asked if we wanted to add a little excitement to our lives.

When we asked what he meant, he said in the next park just around the bend (about 1km away), there was a black bear asleep in a tree, about thirty feet above the ground.

He'd contacted the RCMP about it and they didn't seem to concerned (the bear was in a park after all) and some of the conservation people didn't know what to do about it either.

Now, having never seen a wild bear before, I was deadset keen. So we cruised around and started wandering around this little park (which was no more than 200m long, and just off the highway). It took us a while, but sure enough, there was this great big bear asleep up a tree.

It wasn't going anywhere, so we were able to get pretty much into the base of the tree to shoot photos.

After we were done, we decided to tell a couple of the other people in the park. There was a young family having a picnic there - a mother, a father, a girl of about eight and a little dog. After apologising for disturbing their picnic, I asked if they realised there was a bear at the other end of the park. When their eyes went wide, I took that as a "no". I showed them a couple of photos on my camera's screen, and within a couple of minutes, they were hastily packing things up and jumping back in their car.

They did stop and have a look at the bear themselves before they left.

I felt bad about wrecking their nice relaxing picnic, but I would have felt worse if I had read about a family being attacked by a bear.

Summerland, on Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, Canada