"If you go down in the woods today,
You're sure of a big surprise."

Sep. 10, 2014:  Here we were, my husband and I, at the entrance to Denali National Park in Alaska, about to go our separate ways in a search for the all-too-commonly found grizzly bear and other native fauna. 

I put my husband on a thirteen-hour bus ride to the end of the park and back, both because automobile access ends only fifteen miles in and because when I took the same trip six years ago, a woman sitting in front of me vomited halfway in and none of us could open our windows or exit the bus.

Freed from uxorial restraint, I marched over to the visitor center to meet up with a hiking group led by an unusually earnest (and you can imagine how earnest that is) young female park ranger. Our first order of business--safety instructions. Ok, fine.

Our guide, I'll call her Darla, told us that if we encountered a grizzly, we were to wave our hands over our heads like madmen and shout anything from expletives to "nice bear" in a commanding voice. Then, and this is the part I love, if the bear happened to charge us, we needed to understand that it was a "bluff charge." Smaller creatures would tend to panic and start running away, activating the bear's predatory instincts. We, however, were to stand our ground, which would let bears in the know, know that we were not prey. Six hundred pounds of body and fangs charging? Standing your ground? If all else failed, we were to roll up in a ball on the ground covering the stupid head that had gotten us into this mess.

This was going to take superior positioning skills during the trek to ensure that someone else became a tasty morsel for Smokey. 

We also learned that the real menace out there was moose, because when they charge, they mean it. The idea here was to run like crazy in a zigzag pattern because those adorable 1,000-pounders on those scrawny little legs can't shift direction easily.

Our guide failed to address what would happen if we encountered a bear and a moose simultaneously, and I didn't want to be a wise guy by asking.

I wonder how many of you have been told what to do in dangerous animal encounters. Spending a fair amount of time as I do in Arizona, I have been taught appropriate mountain lion aversion behavior, which is much like that with bears, i.e., standing tall and acting fierce. The one time I actually ran into one, at 6:30 am one morning, I was simply stunned into complete inaction, while the guy walked nonchalantly by me into the desert.

Where I find myself getting massively insecure is on the subject of coral snakes, which are hideously poisonous. Corals have red, yellow, and black bands, but certain nonpoisonous snakes have the same coloration but in a different order. To have the wits to remember which sequence is right takes a level of personal equanimity that I have not, to the present, attained. However, in my continuing attempts to educate, I refreshed my recollection and want you to commit the following jingle to memory: Red touches yellow, kills a fellow. Red touches black, venom lacks.

I can throw in the rules about alligators, again zigzagging and running full tilt, but it all gets pretty exhausting.

Needless to say, on our delightful but predator-free walk, I encountered exactly one red squirrel.

Feeling somewhat deprived by the lack of drama, I determined to drive as far as permitted on the park road, at the end of which an attractive trail ran alongside a mountain stream. The locale was loaded with signs saying that bears frequented the spot, so I got my adrenaline high worrying about a potential encounter. My fear was heightened because, so appalled by both the cost of ($50) and instructions for using bear spray (the gizmo had to be carefully and complicatedly armed before use), I passed on purchasing it. Since I am currently writing this article, you may gather that there was no exchange of glances between my hirsute Alaskan brothers and me.

You may wonder what I saw in total during my junket. I'll tell you. Not counting two gigantic stuffed grizzlies in our Anchorage hotel, the sum included the aforesaid red squirrel, an excitingly different ground squirrel, and two eagles. What did I do wrong?

Pictured here:  A bear warning sign in Denali National Park, Alaska.

Photo by Adrienne Smith