Very beary trail

The March issue of Bike magazine lists the Russian Lakes Trail among 50 incredible trails in the the nation. That's a fair assessment, I guess.

I rode the trail last summer and wrote about it here on the blog. Posted some pictures, too. It's a wonderful trail. Hell, it's so great that even bears love it, and all the ripe salmon that swim beside it. As I wrote last summer, we counted 64 piles of bear shit in only 22 miles. That's a lot of feces from a very scary species.

Bike pays brief lip service to the "buddy system" in mentioning the bears.

I might have worded that a bit more strongly, if I'd written the piece. I would have stated something along of the lines of, "Forget your water. Forget your food. Forget your first-aid kit. But whatever you do, don't forget your bear spray."

Besides, if you carry a can, and you ever have to deploy it and miss the bear, you can just spray one of your riding partners.

Then hope the bear likes the spicy taste of sweaty enchiladas.