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America’s national parks tend to be home to potentially dangerous animals you need to keep an eye out for while visiting. That includes the protected expanse in the Great Smoky Mountains, and rangers who are no strangers to the bears who live there were kept busy during a weekend where the animals were at the center of six reported incidents involving people roaming its trails.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is composed of nearly 525,000 acres of Appalachia split between North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s home to hundreds of different species of animals, but none of them are more closely associated with the preserve than the approximately 1,900 black bears that call the area home.
Those bears have a tendency to make headlines on a very regular basis both in and around the park. Last year, wildlife officials had to rescue one with a backhoe after it got stuck on a ledge overlooking a busy road, and a Christmas parade in the nearby city of Gatlinburg was crashed by another that casually strolled through the town in December.
Rangers were also forced to remind visitors that feeding bears is a bad idea after three people were cited for doing exactly that in the span of a single week, and they also had their hands full last weekend due to some worrying behavior on the part of those animals.
Six incidents involving bears were reported in the course of two days at Great Smoky Mountains National Park
The start of spring can be a fairly dicey time for national parks with a bear population, as the arrival of warmer weather also marks the end of hibernation and the beginning of their quest to find some food after going for months without anything.
According to a press release that the National Park Service issued on Tuesday, some bears in the Great Smoky Mountains were feeling particularly bold last weekend, as rangers responded to six different calls concerning incidents that unfolded on two trails located on the Tennessee side over the course of two days.
That includes three that transpired on the one leading to Ramsey Cascades, where there were “two encounters in which a bear approached visitors and took two backpacks, and a third in which a bear displayed aggressive behavior and briefly chased a group.”
The other three took place on Abrams Falls Trail and involved an “aggressive black bear, including one case where the bear bit a visitor who entered a closed area.” The first trail was still closed as of Tuesday morning, but the second was reopened “after several days with no observed bear activity.”
With that said, you’re probably going to want to keep your head on a swivel.