Sheridan Steele - From Bear Dens to the Oval Office: True stories from my 38 years managing national parks.

Growing up camping

I often went to school with shirts that had ragged rips across the front and back. I told everyone that the parallel tears were from a bears claws, which was true. Fortunately, I was not wearing the shirt at the time. In fact, those same rips were in all my shirts until my mother fixed them with iron-on patches. Let me explain.

As we drove through the gate to Yellowstone National Park, the ranger said, We are warning everyone to avoid keeping food in your car or tent. The bears natural food supply is scarce this summer, so they are looking for food in campsites. I was in the fourth grade and had camped with the family in various national parks over the past several summers. As we drove to the campground, we talked about which food of ours might attract bears and where to keep it.

As we set up our camp, we were careful not to put food in our tent or the car as the ranger warned. However, my dad had placed a cantaloupe in a metal container and put it in the canvas topped trailer we pulled to transport all our camping equipment. We still needed a luggage carrier on top of the car to carry the additional luggage, which left room inside the car for the four kids. Given all that stuff we were hauling with us, people often asked if we were moving. We would cheerfully reply that no, we were camping throughout the West. On that evening in our Yellowstone campsite, my dad put the garment bag over the top of the metal box confident the bears would not smell the cantaloupe underneath.

With two brothers and a sister, our family sized canvas tent was crowded so I volunteered to sleep in the back of our station wagon where I enjoyed the extra space. Something woke me up that first night and I looked out of the car windows to see a large bear on top of our canvas top trailer. The bear was ripping through the top and then the garment bag trying to find the cantaloupe. It turns out experts say that bears have the best sense of smell of any animal alive. The average dogs sense of smell is at least 100 times better than our human noses, but these animal experts say the bears sense of smell is twenty times better than a dog, or 2,000 times better than us. In short, there is no hiding a juicy cantaloupe from a hungry bear.

We had a big plug-in spotlight in our car, and I used it to shine the strong beam into the bears eyes. I kept flashing it back and forth until he jumped down and left but not before he had ripped right through the clothes in the garment bag, including all my shirts. The bear left before he reached the metal container but damage to our clothes was certainly not worth an eighty-nine cent cantaloupe.

My dad was a consulting engineer and we often took long trips from Ohio to the western states. We would camp in many state and national parks along the way and he would combine business with pleasure. Over the course of several of these cross-country trips, I fell in love with Colorados Rocky Mountain National Park in particular and all national parks in general. I also particularly liked the arid and sunny climate of the Southwest.

It never dawned on me that I could make a career out of working in the parks until I had graduated college and returned for a masters degree. In preparing to begin graduate school at Ohio State in urban and regional planning, I was looking at the list of required courses and other electives if I had the time. The courses that really caught my attention were subjects like wildlife management, park design, environmental engineering, and similar natural resource courses. These were not a good match for the Urban Planning Department where I was about to begin my graduate work. After this epiphany, I was fortunate to transfer to the School of Natural Resources and after two years of more stimulating course work, I earned my masters degree in natural resources management rather than urban planning. My undergraduate degree in business administration with a minor in public relations turned out to be a useful combination.

As a lifelong camper, I have enjoyed camping in national and state parks where the natural environment was the attraction rather than the amenities found in commercial campgrounds such as KOA. I love the outdoors, especially the high mountain lakes surrounded by summer snowfields, the clear, dark night skies with millions of stars that are best seen out West, cascading mountain streams, the spray from huge waterfalls, and seeing wildlife in their natural habitat. It is a special thrill to see the newborns in early summer. I also love clean water and fresh air and sitting around a campfire having family conversations without electronics, bright lights, and other modern distractions.

I always assumed I would marry someone who loved the outdoors as much as I did, and we would raise our family to enjoy camping, hiking, and the natural environment, and of course, national parks. In college, a group of friends and I would often go camping on weekends, and sometimes river rafting, canoeing, or bike riding. I remember having a VW Beetle, and every empty space would be full of camping gear, food, and drinks for our weekend trips.

My steady girlfriend during graduate school, Barb, told me she loved to camp and be in the outdoors as much as me, even being a good sport when sleeping through a downpour or packing up our wet tent and gear. Soon after we were married, her younger sister told me that her love of the outdoors was a bit of a stretch, indicating that the only camping she had done before college was one night with the Girl Scouts. However, we were married in an outdoor garden wedding and honeymooned in New England, exploring state and national parks but staying in hotels or cabins.