August 1st, 2021: Opening day for bear season began with putting the kids down for nap and starting the drive from the beautiful, clear west, over the pass and into the sweltering, smoky eastern Cascades. Made it to the front gate by 4:24pm and by 4:34pm I was looking at the bear you see below. It was so dry that I could hear him crackling through the balsam leaves from 400 yards away. By the time I came over the hill, he was at 200 yards, which was feasible, but my head or maybe heart wasn't in a shooting mood yet. Instead, I got to watch him feed his way into the denser service berries..
I thought if I hustled down the road that I could get the wind in my favor and meet him in the next draw. It almost worked too! I snuck as quietly as I could through the weeds while making an insane amount of noise until I could hear a bear working towards me. I found a good stump, dropped the backpack, and felt as ready as a rationale human will ever achieve when coming face to face with a bear. As the bear came into view it was the normal snuffling and snorts as berries are shoveled in prodigious quantities. I ranged him while he was standing and it was only 40 yards, in bow range and I had a rifle. Yet, I didn't think this was the same black bear of just 30 minutes earlier. When he dropped down on all fours, he barely cleared the grass and that is when I set the gun down... This was probably a two year old bear, having his first few months away from mom. He walked to within 25 yards before his path took him back into the thick stuff. It all happened so fast that I didn't think to get the phone out.
Two bears with clean shooting opportunities in the first hour was insane but also feeling like the new normal when the berries are peaking. I heard one more bear in the wetlands around 6:30pm but never got a glimpse, could even have been one of the bears from earlier.
I was excited for the sun to "set" and the temps to fall. Definitely oversharing but way back in May my doctor misdiagnosed a minor rash and put me on a med with immunosuppressant side effects. That led to a full body explosion of parasites that haunted my whole summer. One of the treatments was a head to toe cream that I had reapplied just before my trip. Turns out, it was impossible to sweat through that stuff and it took me the whole evening to figure out why I felt on the verge of heat stroke without hardly moving...
Below is my guess for the first bear spotted as he was caught on camera lounging just down the hill the day before:
August 2nd, 2021: Started the morning overlooking the same area that had the bigger bear the evening before. I passed a couple hours watching the squirrels and practicing not failing to get the focus right on flower pictures.
That came to an abrupt end when a bear woke up from his nap and started to move in the draw right at my feet. It sounded like he was moving upstream so I was able to creep along the road while trying to sneak a peek down through the brush. I don't think he was ever more than 80 yards away but I couldn't see him and somehow he managed to climb up my side and the next thing I know is that a big bear has almost finished strolling across the road at 50 yards. I would have been completely clueless but he gave a random huff as he started to jump up the bank on the other side. The brush was too dry and there was no wind so I couldn't attempt a direct pursuit, plus I had to wait for my heart to settle back down into my chest. I tried to loop around to where I thought he was headed but he had different plans and I never spotted him.
The rest of the day was quiet but in the last hour of daylight things got really exciting. I was standing right at the property line, getting a different look over the berry patches when a bear started working his way out of the thickets on the state land (no hunting allowed). Within a couple minutes it sounded like he was right on the property line and about to bust through the brush. That side of things is so thick that if he did come out where I could see him, he was going to be less than 30 yards away which is a proximity that I had been attempting to avoid to give the wife some peace of mind. 
August 3rd, 2021: The last morning of my hunt finally came with some bluish skies but not a lot of bear activity. One bear was smashing around in the wetlands and I spent about an hour staying really quiet and then tried to entice him out with a distressed rabbit call but that was met with supreme indifference. It had been a pretty epic 48 hours with lots of bear encounters all concentrated within a 40 acre area and that was enough good times for one trip. We would have to settle for no new bear meat in the freezer, which was a minor tragedy, but there was still the upcoming deer season.
The adrenaline was really cranking and I had spent 20 minutes with my rifle trained on the brush, when another bear started making his way out from his tunnels and feeding across the property line. The new bear was maybe 100 yards back down the road and clearly on my land so I decided to leave bear #1 in peace and hope #2 was more cooperative. I didn't make it very far before a doe mule deer came walking up the road from the opposite way. We stared at each other and I figured my hunt was over as surely her impending snort and run would send the bears scrambling back into the security of their brush choked hell holes. But incredibly, when the snorts came and she did a few stomps, bear #2 didn't even bother to stop feeding. My guess is he figured the deer was just catching his scent as she was under 50 yards from him.
I didn't start to see the bear until I had gotten to within 30 yards (I know...) and could confirm it was of moderate size, full black phase bear. But then the lack of wind came back to bite me and he decided that the steroidal cream/filthy hairless ape smells were bad news and he ran back to the tree line. It was actually just a 20 yard retreat before he stopped to figure out what exactly he was smelling but I couldn't see him and decided to call it a night.
These last few photos are bears celebrating having the berry farm to themselves in the couple days after I left + a July shot that was one of my favorite of the year:
