Editor's Roundup
USDA people in the news

Ron Routzahn sure does like to fish--and, when he’s settled in his favorite fishing spot deep in the forest, nothing is gonna keep him from enjoying that moment. Not even bears. And not even if his clothes get shredded.

Routzahn, a program specialist with the Food and Nutrition Service’s field office in Helena, Mont., had hiked with several others into an old fishing haunt on the fringes of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, on the Helena National Forest in central Montana. It was a familiar stretch of the Big Blackfoot River, a place revered by members of the Routzahn family. In fact, according to Craig Forman, the public affairs director for FNS’s Mountain Plains Region based in Denver, a plaque affixed on the side of a cliff above the river bank commemorates the Routzahn pioneer homestead, which is located about 12 miles away and dates back to the late 1800s.

Routzahn removed his new red and green flannel shirt and hung it on a branch of a nearby tree. He then waded into the river to look for small bugs to use them for bait.

When he had a handful of bait, Routzahn stood up and looked toward the shore. There, lurking over the shoulder of a member of his fishing party who was standing on the shore, was the huge brown head of a grizzly bear, scarcely 30 yards away.

“Dave,” Routzahn called calmly, “come here.”

“Nothing doing, Ron. The water’s too cold.”

“Come here, I said. Now,” Routzahn insisted.

“Forget it,” came the reply.

“Then turn around. There’s a bear right behind you.”

The colleague turned his head to look--then quickly spun his head back. Moving slowly, he stepped into the stream, and all four members of the fishing party began yelling loudly, hoping to scare the bear away.

The grizzly turned abruptly and ran off into the woods. Routzahn then cautiously stepped out of the river and walked over to where he had hung his shirt. He found it lying on the ground.

“When I picked it up and eyeballed it,” he recounted, “I saw lots of daylight in several places.” In fact, the bear had ripped out one of the armpits and had torn holes in the fabric. And the new hiking shoes of a member of the fishing party were both full of holes, punched clean through by the bear’s incisors.

Now, most people would have hightailed it out of the woods at this point, back to the trailhead and the pickup waiting there.

“But dadgumit,” Routzahn declared, “we drove 45 miles to fish our favorite spot--and no bear was going to ruin it for us.”

He added that he is familiar with grizzlies, he understands them, and he knows that they simply want to be left alone--which was exactly what the fishing party had in mind.

The fishing group then moved to another spot upstream--when the bear appeared again, sitting on its haunches, watching them. “I gave a whistle--don’t ask me why, now that I think about it,” he acknowledged, and the bear headed toward the group.

“Well, the stream was noisy, and grizzlies characteristically have bad eyesight,” Routzahn observed. “So we kept quiet and stood still--and the four of us may have merely resembled small trees to the bear.”

“Plus, the bear was upwind, which certainly helped us,” he quipped.

The bear then camped on an island in the stream for over two hours--“and that’s the exact spot where we wanted to be,” Routzahn advised. It then finally crossed over to a cliff above the stream, and went away.

“We just out-waited the bear, eventually caught lots of fish, and had some great war stories--which we all recount frequently, when we’re deep in the woods sitting around a campfire,” he laughed.