Acadia & White Mountains Trip Day 1

The calm before the storm.

Last week, Heather and I decided that the time was right to take another vacation. I had been saving my time diligently until the summer, so I have a number of weeks to play with. We looked at the calendar and chose this week, as there was nothing scheduled for the weekends or during the week. Our adventure of choice was the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and later, go further east and spend time in Acadia National Park. We visited Acadia in the summer of 2009 and loved it, but we have never been to the White Mountains.
     We did some pre-trip planning, and decided to camp for two nights in the Whites, and two nights in Acadia. The rest of the days were going to be spent in motels. However, little did we know, more days than originally planned would be spent in motels. Our campground in the Whites was at the Crawford Notch Campground. I checked trip-advisor and the reviews seemed really good, so we booked two nights there for Sunday and Monday.
     The summer of 2013, we went out west for a three week vacation. I made notes for that trip, but I am rather angry with myself that I never added it to this blog. It's wonderful to look back on some of these entries and relive the adventures( and sometimes misadventures). Hind-sight being what it is, moving on to the present. The reason I mention last year, is that every year we learn more and more about long term road traveling. One of the best investments we made last summer, was a very expensive Pelican cooler. The investment has paid for itself ten-fold, as we have used it for long term food storage. The cooler is supposed to keep food cold for days on end, and it really does work well. You can spend a large chunk of money on food when you travel, with the cooler, we have saved a ton.
I also mention last year, because we never camped once last season. The tent was never removed from the bag. For this trip I did a cursory check of the tent to make sure that everything was still there, but never really fully opened it to check on it's condition. This ultimately was a mistake, as you will find out later.
     The car was loaded on Saturday, and we ended up using the Thule cargo carrier from the 2010 west trip. We packed all of the camping supplies in the Thule, and everything else in the vehicle. We left Sunday morning fairly early and had a rather uneventful 7 hour drive to the Crawford Notch campground. Checking the weather often, we were between storms, so never really encountered any rain to speak of. As we drove east through Troy New York, we quickly crossed over into Vermont. Vermont seems gorgeous, with rolling hills and deciduous forests aplenty. It has to be beautiful in the fall. We drove across the Green Mountains, and soon crossed a river into New Hampshire. Interstate 91 north took us to Route 302 East which leads to the White Mountains. We didn't stop along the way for photo ops, as we were quite focused to get to our campsite before the looming rain was upon us. We followed the Saco River through the valley into the White Mountain national forest. The mountains loomed on either side of us, it was quite a sight.
     We arrived at the campground and went inside to check in. The lady in the campstore/registration building was pleasant and upbeat. She engaged us in chit-chat and handed us a small green slip of paper. "Make sure you read this, you don't want any critters getting into your food". Critters? "Keep your camera ready!" she said. Not one mention of the word 'bears'. Just a laugh and a smile and a no big deal attitude about it. She talked about the fact that our site was beautiful and it was right within walking distance of the Saco river and the trails. Cool! Not really.
     After finding our site, it started raining, and fairly hard at that. We put up our pop-up tarp first , so we could at least have some shelter from the deluge. Then we setup the tent. I immediately noticed a strange musty type smell coming from the rain-fly. There was some sort of weird melted residue on the outside of it. Not good at all. We made a quick dinner of spaghetti and meatballs ( ok we just had a dehydrated backpacker meal ) and had some snacks. We then drove back to the camp store to get an LED lantern and some fire-wood, and I noticed an article cut from a local paper under the plastic of the counter. It was about the local bear problems. I asked the kid at the counter if this campground has an issue with bears. He shrugged his shoulders, and hung his head as if he was just caught in the cookie jar. "Yeah, we do. There was a late berry season, so the bears are coming across the river and foraging for campers food." Seriously? Great. I shared this information with Heather and we both weren't too pleased.
     Arriving back at our campsite, I quickly got a fire going and we started to relax. Heather asked me what time it was, I replied that it was 7:48. Just then, out of the corner of my eye I saw some movement. I turned to look, and literally 15 feet behind us, walked a female black bear with two tiny cubs in tow. She was walking along our campsite line. Not making a sound. I said "Holy Sh*T .. bears!" Heather got up and went for the vehicle front seat. I just stood there in shock and watched her and the cubs move along the drainage next to our site. Easily the closest I have ever been to a bear in the wild. She was fat, but not very large, maybe the size of a very large dog, and looked well fed. The cubs were adorable. But this was a really bad precedent. First off there was no fear of humans. She is also teaching her cubs that this is the way to get food, rather than naturally foraging.
     After getting over the shock of what just happened, we tried to settle down. I noticed a little boy playing along the road at one of the river sites, and his parents enjoying the fire up at the site. I walked over and told them of our encounter, they were shocked, thanked me, and told their boy that play time was over. Around 8:15 or so, we got our headlamps out. Heather started shining hers around the site just for giggles, and said "There's the bear coming right at us!!" I looked, and sure enough there was a bear. Except this was not the female. This was a MUCH larger male. He was walking along the drainage to the right of our site. right towards us. I quickly set off my panic button on the vehicle, and the horn started blaring. He changed course and went up the road, right towards another campers site. I watched him go towards their car, get up onto the back of their truck and grab a loaf of bread. You would think with the yelling and the car alarm I was setting off, these people would have been aware, they weren't. Finally I heard some yelling and clapping and the bear went off into the woods with his easy meal. So now we have campers who are not bear-aware. Excellent. The bear then started lumbering back towards our site again. Another panic button hit and yelling, but this time I did have camera in-hand and took some video. At one point I yelled and he just stopped. Looked at me, as if calculating if it was worth it, and quickly started running away.

     We had a quick discussion and realized this place was just not safe at all. The tent was in really rough shape, and the bears were accustomed to getting their meals from ignorant campers. Our first time camping in a while was turning out to be a dud. So we just took our chances, leaving our gear to be picked up later and left. We drove down route 302 south towards the town of Conway. Pulling into the first place we saw that looked decent, called the Villager Motel, in Bartlett. The place looked pretty empty, so there were rooms available. I told the Indian lady at the front counter of our adventure at the Crawford Notch campground and she just kind of shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps this happens often? So day 1 of the trip was complete, and already we had a good vacation story to tell....