“My boyfriend and I were camping in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park (Aberta, Canada) this past summer. On the last night of our stay, as I was falling asleep, my boyfriend told me I had been pushing him off his side of the air mattress (I was trying to steal heat from him, as he’s a human furnace), and asked me to give him room. Sounds good, we went to sleep.
I woke up to him shoving me, and I thought I was crowding him by accident, so I moved over a little.
He shoves me harder and I’m annoyed now, because I already moved and I was tired. So I somewhat loudly say, ‘I’m moving!’
And he grabbed me and shushed me. I knew something was wrong and was awake right away.
He whispered very softly, ‘Do you hear something?’
And right away I heard the unmistakable exhaling huff of a bear right by my head. My heart was pounding because at this point, I could hear it sniffing us and huffing (which is not good if you know grizzlies). My boyfriend said we needed to get to our truck and I agreed, but from what I can hear, the bear was between our tent and truck. Luckily, we have command start and our truck has a very aggressive start, so when my boyfriend started the truck, I heard some crashing through the trees and we both ran to the truck.
We drove a lap around our campground to make sure the bear hadn’t gone into anyone else’s site but didn’t see it. We slept in the truck until it was light out and let the wildlife hotline in the area know before we left. We started second-guessing ourselves because this all happened at about 1:30 a.m. But when we were packing up the tent that next day, we found brown hair all over the side of the tent where our heads were and on the grill of the truck. I’ve never been so terrified and full of adrenaline in my life.”
