Take your mauling like a man

Jordan, from Durango, recounted this tale of terror at the campsite.

“I was camping with my boyfriend this summer in a national forest and had finished dinner,” she said. “We were sitting in our fat camping chairs talking and sipping whiskey when all of a sudden, my boyfriend said, ‘Oh my god, a dog just walked right past you!’”

Jordan turned to realize that her boyfriend had suffered a Jim Beam-induced hallucination.

“As I turned to look, my eyes fixed on a bear that had waddled only about three feet past me,” she said.

Realizing it was making its way to another campsite, Jordan and her boyfriend started clapping and making noise to try to ward off the bear. They called to the campsite below, warning them to be on the lookout.

“The woman screamed in sheer terror, ‘I have a toddler here!’” Jordan recalled.

The scream must have done it, because the bear backtracked and loped back up the mountainside. But the startled woman and her husband continued bear patrol for some time.

“The shined flashlights into the trees for hours,” Jordan said. “Before we went to bed, she ran to me and said, ‘My husband is French, and he doesn’t know anything about bears. If one breaks into your tent, do you just lay there and let it maul you?’

“I’m sure that was the last time they went camping.”

Hold the mustard

Eric, from Durango, e-mailed a bear story on behalf of a friend who left his cabin in the woods unattended for a week.

“When he came back, he quickly learned that a bear had been living in his cabin and raiding his refrigerator,” he said.

Unfortunately, this bear proved to be a little more finicky and temperamental than the average bruin.

“If it found something it didn’t like, such as milk and condiments, it would throw them around, so the walls were splattered with goo,” Erik said. “The place was a total mess.”

Strangely enough, the bear had a hankering for cream cheese and Cheerios, both of which were polished off.

One for Japanese technology

Michelle, from Durango, parked her ’88 Mazda at a popular trailhead for several weeks in an area that had seen a lot of bear activity.

“Sure enough, when I got back, the trailer next to me had been demolished by a bear that peeled it open like a tin can,” she said. However, the contents of the Mazda were intact.

“Apparently, the bear had also tried to break into my Mazda by putting its paws on the chrome above the windows because it was all scratched up. But it couldn’t get in,” she said.

Rather than fix up the old car, Michelle ripped off all the chrome trim around the window, and no one was the wiser.

“I sold it and nobody noticed,” she said. “Go Mazda!”

It came in through the bathroom window

A tenant of Karen Carver, of Durango, didn’t have to go far to see his bear – it tried to come through his window.

“I still have nose prints on the window,” Carver said.

It all began one night, right before the Fourth of July, Carver said.

“It was about two in the morning and I heard this crash,” she said.

She went downstairs to investigate and heard commotion and shouting coming from her tenant David’s apartment. However, the noise soon subsided and she thought it better not to interfere.

It wasn’t until the next morning that she got the real story.

“I ran into David and he said the bear was trying to pry open the window,” she said. “He said he could feel the breath through the screen.”

David, who described the bear as being, “Volkswagen-sized,” took some precautions for the rest of the night.

“He slept with his ice axe by his bed,” she said.

While Carver is still not sure what the bear was after, she thinks it was lured to the area by some well-intentioned but ill-informed neighbors.

“A house on the next street over was found to have a Rubbermaid full of hotdogs and buns on the sidewalk and saucers of bird seed set up along the walkway,” she said.