http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... AB9-VGIkzM

Hi folks. Imagine many of you have seen this latest video on YouTube making the rounds on major news sites of a mother Mexican black bear and cub climbing a rather significant rock wall with some scary exposure. Watching the cub is simply something to behold.

For decades some of us have been stashing our food up on cliff ledges or atop big erratics where the conventional wisdom had been though bears are excellent climbers on trees given their claws, that was not the case on rock because they are rather bulky and maybe not patient enough to plan out some difficult moves to climb up something. Then too what goes up must come down and the notion of some big bear down climbing some of the places we've put our food just never seemed very possible. But now have doubts especially if that duo was in town.

One can expect there will be a fair number who will immediately claim yeah bears are way better on rock than we of the monkey clan but my suspicion is most of that will tend to come from those that have the politically correct agenda to push safe food storage even if they have never actually witnessed a bear climb rock themselves. Of course Yosemite in particular has banned that old practice for some years and probably for good reasons that they got more than climber's chalk bags far too many times. So at least in some of the national parks most of us move about with a Garcia. But in USNF areas and wildernesses, sometimes I use an Ursack on a ledge especially above timberline where trees are few and often too short. So would like to hear some true cases where any of you climbers actually witnessed a bear doing anything like those two in the news.

http://www.davidsenesac.com
David

Lack of response is looking like what I suspected. Climbers have not been seeing black bears climb steep rock like the two in the video. Likewise same on supertopo and some other regional boards, though many have commented how amazing the cub's work was. One guy did mention he once saw a bear mantle up a rock.

So which one of you guys put on a bear suit? And does Mini-Me have a cub suit?

Yeah, it went viral on YouTube. But there aren't any other perspectives of that section of rock, so its hard to tell how really steep it is. I'd assume bears can climb some fairly good-angled stuff (not high-angled), and it would depend on how good the handholds (paw holds?) are, plus what the 'reward' is at the end. A biggy jar of peanut butter slathered in bacon fat would probably be worth some elevated risk potential to a hungry bear.

That's a wicked video.

I, too, have been stashing food on cliffs, but I have been suspending my food bags from chockstones in cracks. I've always assumed that bears could climb, but I don't believe that they can ascend smooth jam cracks.