We went way up North in Minnesota to check out the bears at the Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary. It's both a terrible and wonderful place.
Years ago, Vince Shute - a Minnesota Logger, was shooting black bears left and right so he could run his business. Eventually, he got tired of doing this, and decided the bears didn't want to mess up his business, they were hungry. So he started feeding them. And while this did solve the nuisance bear problem he faced - they stopped getting into his cabins and disrupting his business, it also created a problem that persists today - bears looking for food at what is now the Sanctuary (the logging business ended quite some time ago), rather than in the wild.
Today, of course, we would never open an operation like this. We know it's a bad idea to feed bears because they will, no doubt, start to rely on that food. But at this point, the operators of the Sanctuary don't see a way out. If they stopped feeding them tomorrow, the bears would become nuisance bears in the nearby town, and nobody wants that. They've opted, instead, to feed the bears the highest quality diet they can, emulating what the bears search for in the wild to the extent possible (no more sour-dough pancakes from Vince!). They do this for most of the non-hibernation months - and guess they feed about 400 bears a year. Some return a lot, some for brief periods (I'm not actually sure I believe that last bit).
From 5:00 - 8:00, Tuesday - Sunday, visitors can pay a small fee and enter the Sanctuary. From there, you can take a bus out to a platform, and then sit and watch bears.
It's nuts. Truly. We saw 20 - 40 bears there every evening we visited. We saw baby bears climbing trees every evening we visited (what could be cuter?). We saw a bear that likes to lounge in front of a cabin, bears that went up on their hind legs and growled - everything you can imagine. It's the only sanctuary dedicated to black bears in the world, and getting there is not particularly easy.
My best friend from elementary school and her two daughters met us there. The four kids were perfect companions, with two introverts and two extroverts running around from sun up, when they would often relight a fire left smoking from the night before before playing a few games, paddling around a bit, and checking out the area our cabin was in.
