812: The Bear at the End of the Tunnel
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. It was just first time working for his big brother. He was probably needed somebody last minute because he got bailed on him. Jeff also had somebody bail on him. He moved back home for the summer, but his girl he liked. And it became like really apparent right away that like that wasn't going to work out. So he had some time on his hands. His brother was doing a research study on black bears. His brother was a wildlife biologist. He offered him this job, this field tech. And a summer working with black bears was a dream. So that wouldn't be a dream for everybody. Why was that a dream for you? Oh, I just think bears are the coolest animals. They're so cool. Black bears are like so cool how fast they can like climb a tree like their ears. I love like their bears ears. I just love everything about bears. So Jeff loves bears. His brother West studies bears. Jeff is the younger brother. West is the older brother. West's research was to track where bears were in Bryce Canyon National Park, in Utah. Here he is. There was a bear that had broken into a tent, swatted a woman while she was sleeping, really scared her. And so the idea was to call her some bears, track them, see where they're going, how they're spending their time. If they could figure that out, the park could relocate campsites away from those areas and post signs. So West and Jeff spent a summer putting collars with GPS devices onto a bunch of wild bears. And then in the winter, they had to go back and check on the bears, do a quick exam, make sure the collars weren't too tight once the bears fattened up for winter, swap out any old collars that needed new batteries. And it turns out the easiest way to do that is to visit the bears when they're hibernating and they're dens. And most bear dens, that job isn't actually too difficult or scary. The dens are small, like a cavity in some rock or under a tree, West says. And they're generally shallow enough that I can just, I have a pole that has a syringe on the end of it. I can just extend that pole and sedate the bear from outside of the den. I don't even generally even have to go inside, generally. But then like you get a couple of dens where it's like you're the only thing between the bear and the exit and that's when it gets kind of sketchy. And that's what happened in this case. Oh, this one was like on another level though, this one was crazy. This one happened on a wintery day, the two of them headed out to see bear number 95 in their study. They saw a signal on the GPS, kind of maybe a thousand feet up a steep hillside to get
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