If you didn't realize it by now, my son Jordan and I went to Pickett State Park in Tennessee. It's in the upper Cumberland Plateau area and there is a great big national recreation area right next two that State Park, plus multiple other state parks bordering Pickett, and a state recreation area that borders Pickett. That is to say there are tens of thousands of wooded hilly and/or mountainous terrain all right there most of it is restricted development stuff so it's mostly wild. When we got there those beware of the bears fliers are all over the park, every single door or notice area, all the trash cans, all the picnic benches, everywhere. Jordan asked right away if bears were actually going to be a problem where we threw up the tent. I told him that I didn't expect them to be as we were right next to the bath house in the middle of the campground but even further than that there were going to be several stupider people there making themselves better targets than we would be. The first night there was uneventful apart from hearing a coyote just outside the campground area. There were noisy kids and all and you could hear bats overhead, but nothing much and it was a relaxing night apart from us forgetting to bring pillows.
Friday the following day out hiking we spotted some bear scat way out on a ridge miles away from the campground. Jordan seemed spooked by it, but it was at least a couple days old and it didn't seem to be important to me apart from confirmation of bear in the state park area and validating the fliers......which I believed in the first place given the location.
Friday night at I was sort of preparing for the worst. I'm still not expecting trouble with the locals, our food was never in the tent, our trash is put away in the appropriate bins, everything is put up in the back of my SUV which is a few dozen feet from the tent. The weather was my concern as we were expecting a storm front to go through in the night. At near 1 in the morning I was woken by a series of small explosions at the site beside ours. Sitting up I unzipped the window and looked over to see embers from their fire ring strewn all about the campsite beside ours. No idea what it was, 4 or 5 fairly loud bangs in rapid succession. I'm thinking they must've left something too close to the fire and it eventually blew?
Then the rains and wind came, wind actually blowing the rain up under the rain fly of the tent through the mess ceiling and getting the inside of the tent wet. There wasn't lightning or thunder, but the wind blew everything around pretty well and stuff got wet. That was roughly thirty minutes after the bangs. Saturday went by, and we were at the lake fishing till 7pm where I started getting worried about the temperature. When we left home the projected low was 53, leaving the lake at just after dark it was already 50 and the sky was completely cloudless. Stopping at the park office to check the forecast the expected low was down to 46 but my guess at the time was it was getting much colder and we didn't have the right clothes or sleeping bags for it. We went to the tent had dinner made a fire then turned in just after 10. It was getting cold. This is when things got good.
At just before midnight I was jerked awake by a woman just on the other side of the bathhouse screaming. Then just a ton of general commotion, people moving about, tents being unzipped, excited voices going too quickly to make out at a distance and all talking at once. There were kids crying under all the din. A few minutes after the scream things calmed enough I could make out the woman saying she had heard a noise outside her tent and opened the fly to inspect it finding a large (her words not my impression) bear nosing the tent her kids were sleeping in. She said it ran off into the woods when she screamed. Given this confirmation of a bear in the area that is perfectly willing to come right up to peoples tents and having seen several people stupid enough to just have coolers and food literally sitting close enough to the tents as to be touching them I went to the truck and got the rifle to take into the tent with Jordan and I. There was still zero expectation that we would have trouble as there was no smell of food near us, but I was thinking that if the bear was indeed trying to get into those kids' tent they must have food in there and the bear knows it so things could get bad for them and I was far nearer by than the rangers who would've been off site asleep.
Once everything had calmed down I went back into the tent and back into the sleeping bag because it was downright cold out now without even a moderate jacket. Just a handful of minutes after laying back down I heard two men down the hill from us in the campground yelling and urging the bear to leave on it's own volition. Nobody sounded panicked, no reason to believe anything problematic was happening, I got out of the tent again and stayed out for several minutes to see if I could see anything but couldn't Seeing nothing and with the commotion down there having died down I went back to bed. This time I stayed dressed because the bear has made itself issue twice in thirty minutes and again I'm thinking it's not getting any better tonight.
An hour later I woke up again to what sounded like leaves rustling and the sort of low grumbly sound of a black bear so I got up again to have a look around. I heard no more noise, saw no animals, everything seemed quiet so at that point I was just thinking it was my mind playing tricks on me. I had heard Jordan rustling around in his sleeping bag and thought it was steps, the grumbly growly noise was just Jordan snoring. Back to bed I went, really cold now. One more time, now at 3 according to my phone, I was woken up again this time up the hill from us by rattling pots and pans. No doubt the bear having found more interesting smells. Heard no human interaction this time, I once again exited the tent but the noises were over a rise and I couldn't see anything. I did make a mental note that all the bug noises and bat chirping was absent this time. It was dead quiet when I got out of the tent. I'll point out that at no time after bringing the rifle into the tent did I ever actually touch it again, it just sat there in case it was needed. After that first go around at midnight no one ever seemed panicked or worried by the presence of the bear so I wasn't either. Every time I got out of the tent I did have my pistol on one hip and a hunting knife on the opposite, but that's simply standard operating procedure for me whenever I'm in anything resembling wilderness. The holster and knife were still on the belt on the pants it had on that day so when I got dressed to leave the tent they were simply already there. About seven just after sun up I woke up to more pots and pans clanging up the hill as well as what sounded like boxes and tupperware containers being thrown around. I'm assuming the stuff being cleaned up after being ransacked earlier that night. Knowing that all my chances for sleep were gone now I got up and looked at the thermometer with the truck......36 degrees.
Talking to a gentleman then who had walked up the hill to the bathroom I learned that what I heard at one thirty likely was the bear walking past the tent, the man said it was harassing him at twelve thirty and again at one thirty. He also said the bear was pressing on the sides of their pop up tent camper trying to get in. They had used a slow cooker in the camper all day Saturday cooking a chicken dish. One of those times it tore into one of the other sites trash down there too apparently. The man lamented the decision to use the slow cooker and said the only option he saw moving forward was to leave the area despite having paid for another night. There was no way to clear the smell of the cooking food and he knew the next night would bring more of the same. He did volunteer that despite the bad decision making, they understood it was bad decision making and not the bears fault. I never heard more from the group where the woman screamed. That was a large group, possibly a church group in my estimation, occupying several sites with probably 8 to 10 tents set up in close proximity. All the kids noisy and running around were annoying and disturbing of the otherwise pleasant and serene weekend. The take away for me, and I hope my son too, it was a great few days. Every trail we went on had fantastic views, we met and had conversations out on the trails with a small number of pleasant people, nature and being out in nature is great. The only problems apart from the temperature dipping 17 degrees below the projections were people in the campground just assuming that the rules and what I would think of as common sense didn't apply to them.