On our last night in the woods Malynda prepared a pineapple upside down cake in the dutch oven. Man it turned out good, but most of it was left in the pan. Once again, we settled in around the fire after Chloe went to bed. Uncle Ryan started a long conversation about vampire bats and bears and such to freak Zachary out. We also discussed what to do if you see a bear since we were in fact in bear country. This is only evident by the bear proof food storage boxes in each campsite. Well anyway just as were about to move onto other subject matter, Ryan noticed a huge brown bear with its head all the way in our bear box (we had left it open). Malynda later said she didn't believe Ryan until she saw the look on his face. We all saw it at this point, Zach too, only ten feet from where we were sitting. The sight of this creature instantly took our breath away. On all fours he stood at least 4 feet tall. Amazingly none of us panicked, we all stood up and Ryan and I yelled at the bear to go away and sure enough he did just as we had hoped. He wandered only about 20 yards away and was chowing down on our marshmallows. Well I had the maglite on him as we were getting ready to close the bear box when he decided to come back for more. With the light on him his eye glowed yellow, he let out a loud snort and began to charge. Now we all knew what to do when a bear does this. Stand your ground, scream and yell, and wave something over your head to make yourself look big. We got the scream and yell part right as we turned and tried to run tripping over chairs and each other. Luckily the bear was only bluffing. He stopped coming after about ten feet, so we yelled some more and he ended up going away. The most unfortunate part of this whole ordeal was that Zachary was terrified, granted we were all scared, but poor Zachary was hysterical. So to make a long story short we packed up our crap and got the hell out of there. Oh yeah, Ryan and I blame this whole thing on Malynda's pineapple upside down cake. Dang that smelled good. I'm sure Ryan's version will be better.