Black Bears on the Chippewa River Trail Traditional Cache
Black Bears on the Chippewa River Trail
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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Just off of the Chippewa River Trail, on the shores of Bear Creek.
The Native Americans honored the bear as a supernatural being and treated the bear hunt with great ceremony and respect. They prized bear skins for robes and the meat and oil for cooking, fuel and medicines. The settlers also placed great value on bear meat and especially sought the bearskins with which they made clothing and bedding. As more settlers moved into Wisconsin, however, there was conflict between people and bears. Bounty systems were set up to encourage killing of the "noxious pests" and fur traders paid high prices for bearskins. This large-scale killing caused the numbers of bears to decrease. Logging and settlement also reduced the bear’s habitat and numbers. Once rare, the black bear is making a resurgance.
Until the reintroduction of the elk, the black bear was Wisconsin's largest resident mammal. Adult males weigh about 250-350 pounds. The largest Wisconsin bear weighed in at 700 pounds
Bear walk on the soles of their feet, the same as people, and have five toes with non-retractable claws. The bear's hind footprint looks a lot like a human one. Claws come in handy for hunting, climbing trees and tearing open logs in search of insects. Even though they’re huge bulky animals, black bears can run over 30 miles per hour and climb a tree
quite quickly.
Bears like large forested areas with swamps and streams mixed in, similar to where this cache is placed. Bear populations have been increasing from an estimated 5,700 in 1985 to 12,700 in 2000.
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