Loaded for Bear in the Southland Mountains

Dawn had just broken over the San Bernardino Mountains when Bill La Haye’s pickup rolled to a stop at a remote trail head. With a rifle strapped to his back, he walked into the forest in pursuit of black bear.

He quickly swung off the main trail, clambered over a downed tree and stepped into a canyon so remote that La Haye suspects no one had visited it in a decade.

The game path he followed was unmercifully steep, armed with frost-covered logs and ankle-busting rock fields. If he managed to bag a bear, it would take him two trips to pack out the meat and the hide.

But La Haye wouldn’t mind.

“When I decide where to hunt,” he said, “I look at a map and go where the people aren’t.”

Just a few ridgelines away, the nation’s second-largest metropolis edged into another workday.

For most hunters, Southern California is an afterthought. Most will tell you they prefer the emptier spaces and more plentiful game of Northern California or the northern Rockies.

But each year, at least a few hunters--people such as Bill La Haye--walk into the southern mountains and hope to bag a bear. In remote corners of the San Gabriels, Topatopas and other ranges, they find a land remarkably unchanged since the time grizzly bears ruled.

And, with increasing frequency, a few of them kill a bear.

An hour up the trail, La Haye looked down at a pile of bear scat. He poked it with a stick. It was filled with manzanita berries. But it was cold.

La Haye has killed three bears in his career, two in this wilderness. Silently, he turned and continued up the path.

3 Million Acres of Protected Open Space

Although Southern California is often held up as the epitome of urban sprawl, its metropolitan areas are mostly surrounded by designated open space--the Cleveland, San Bernardino, Angeles and Los Padres national forests.

The forests protect more than 3 million acres, much of the land crawling with black bears. Two of the largest black bears ever taken in the state--both well over 600 pounds--were killed in the San Bernardinos in the mid-1990s.

The story of how this came to be is remarkable. It begins with one fact: Scientists estimate that California is home to 23,000 adult black bears, and some in the bear business call that figure conservative.

As for the number of black bears living in Southern California, no one really knows, but researchers say at least 400 prowl the Angeles National Forest alone.

One recent study found that Mt. Wilson lies within the home range of 50 bears, a remarkably dense population for an area not far from the suburban homes of Altadena and Sierra Madre.

What makes this even more significant is that most biologists say black bears, like many Southern Californians, are relative newcomers to the area. When the Spanish missionaries arrived in the late 1700s, this part of the state was the domain of the grizzly bear.

The grizzlies were legendary for their immense size and ferocity. And men became legends by killing them. The Spanish lassoed grizzlies from horseback and sometimes pitted them against bulls in duels to the death. In Ventura County, a rancher named Ramon Ortega claimed to have single-handedly killed 56 in 1856.

By the early 1900s, the grizzlies were pretty much gone. It turned out they were notoriously slow to reproduce--a fact not learned until the 1960s.

Although they graced the flag of the state once known as the Bear Flag Republic, no one fought for their conservation. But with the grizzlies gone, a door was left open to the only other member of the ursine family that inhabits the Lower 48, the black bear.

Falling Down a Sure Thing

What is it like to go bear hunting with Bill La Haye?

Imagine a stair-climbing machine at the gym, but put it on the most difficult setting. To simulate the thin mountain air at 8,800 feet, remove 20% of the oxygen from the room.

Then cover the stairs with frost, moss, damp leaves and pine needles. Line each side of the machine with thorns, branches and slippery, elusive handholds.

Falling down is not an option but a certainty.

The canyon La Haye was climbing lies within the San Gorgonio Wilderness, about 45 minutes northeast of San Bernardino. Although crisscrossed by foot trails, most of the area will only be seen by people who are either lost, hardy enough to look for it or have a window seat in an airplane.

This is the way La Haye prefers it.

“Hunting is about personal toil,” he said. “That’s the rewarding part. And the solitude. If anything gets screwed up, it’s my fault. It’s beautiful and harsh up here.”

La Haye, 48, grew up in the Bay Area and as a youth spent much of his time in the outdoors. He eventually became a wildlife biologist, and moved to the Big Bear area in the late 1980s to study California spotted owls. When fall came around, he hunted deer and frequently saw bears.

So one year he bought a bear license.

“I did it under the presumption I wanted to experience it and get a taste of the meat,” he said. “I found it absolutely enjoyable.”

La Haye’s method is simple. He finds a remote area and tries to cover a lot of ground. More than anything, he seeks outposts where he can sit silently--sometimes for hours--and take in the view.

Most often, it’s a matter of waiting until a deer or bear wanders past. Deer possess extraordinarily sharp senses, but bears have poor eyesight and hearing.

“If you can stay downwind of them, you can literally walk right up to them and kick them in the rear,” La Haye said.

On this morning, there were no bears to kick. But there was no shortage of bear scat. Piles dotted the trail every half-mile or so--and under one tree La Haye found a bear bed scooped out of pine needles, with a huge scat sitting in the middle.

At one point, he stopped again and pointed down to something else. It was a deflated balloon, the first of several he would find. Prevailing winds bring balloons from all over the L.A. area and deposit them in the mountains.

He shook his head in disgust.

Some Bears Trucked, Others Roamed South

In November 1933, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park allowed the state Department of Fish and Game to take 27 bears from the park. The department trucked the bears south and released some in the San Gabriels, near Mt. Baldy, and the rest in the San Bernardinos.

Some researchers surmise that other black bears wandered south out of the Sierra Nevada on their own, although there is little definitive proof of this.

Despite the brisk growth of Southern California’s human population in recent decades, the black bear population today is believed to be thriving, even if researchers don’t really know how many are out there. But why, especially when so many smaller species struggle for survival?

Wildlife biologists believe the answer is twofold.

The first reason is that black bears eat pretty much anything--grasses, berries, acorns, carcasses and the occasional fawn.

“I think the numbers [of bears] are an indication how good the habitat is,” said Steve Loe, a wildlife biologist with the San Bernardino National Forest. “The San Bernardino Mountains have some of the greatest plant diversity of any mountains in the state, because they have the coastal and desert side and a range of elevations. There’s always something for the bears to eat.”

The second reason is that black bears--unlike many other species--adapt around people. “They eat out of trash cans, campgrounds and dog dishes. The combination of the natural habitat and the human sources makes it a good place to live if you’re a bear,” Loe said.

The habitat is so good that Southern California black bears are expanding their range. In the last decade, they’ve pushed north through the Coast Range and into the fringes of the Monterey Peninsula. Bears living in the San Bernardinos found a way under Interstate 10 and wandered as far south as San Diego County--which hadn’t seen bears since the demise of the grizzlies.

The state imposes a quota on bear hunting, allowing 1,500 to be killed during a season that usually runs from late summer to late fall. Hunters had bagged 1,460 black bears heading into the weekend, and the season will likely close in the next few days.

Hunting is permitted on most public lands, but not in national or state parks. And where it is allowed, rules keep shooters well away from campgrounds, roads and popular trails.

Last year 72 bears were taken in Southern California, a low number that game wardens and biologists attributed to the area’s geography. Most hunters, they said, simply can’t handle terrain so remote and steep.

Jim Davis, a wildlife biologist with the Department of Fish and Game, said hunting has little or no impact on southern bear populations.

“I think it’s fair to say we are probably losing more bears to road kill than to what hunters are taking,” he said.

Experience Counts More Than Success

La Haye has hunted for more than half his life, yet the more he hunts, the more he notices a change in attitude that has come with age and experience.

“I’ve learned it’s the experience more than the success,” he said, resting against a log.

“Hunting is an annual, spiritual pilgrimage for me,” he said. “It’s a complex mix of every emotion. There’s anticipation, disappointment, loneliness, a lot of reflectiveness.”

On this day, La Haye never saw a bear, never even chambered a round in his rifle. At 2 p.m., he returned to his pickup, seven hours after stepping into the woods.

At one point on the long hike out, La Haye had come to a small creek. He knelt down, lowered his face to the surface and guzzled away his thirst.

It’s rare to see anyone drink water straight from a creek these days. Too much chance of picking up a nasty parasite.

“As long as there’s nothing up above to taint the water, you’re OK,” La Haye said. “And there’s nothing above.”

He gestured upstream, where there was only empty land, willows and pines, maybe a bear, and a ridge no one had bothered to name.

There was nothing up there, for sure.

But in another sense, to people like Bill La Haye, there was everything.