Bears oh my!!

I have been having all these animals encounters lately on my various adventures, but the most recent was the scariest and most interesting. As some of you might know I have been very involved with Asheville Hoops, a blooming hooping business run by my friend Melanie. Well I was at a music festival last week, at a venue called Deerfield. It's 1000 acres privately owned by these guys who took over the land after their father passed and now use it for various events. Well the beauty of this place is that you can camp and see music, hike and bike on trails as well. So I was on a morning run before all the festival goers woke up and lost track of time. I think I had been running on some barely marked trails for about 45 min. when I decided I might want to turn around and head back to camp. Well about 5 min later a baby black bear darted in front of me from a bunch of blackberry bushes in the corner. My first thought was, "Oh my God a baby bear, how cute!" Then I realized the what that really meant. Baby bear=mama bear. Then I heard a low grumble above me in the bushes and some mulling around. I had two choices: try and slowly pass through the area where I could hear them mulling around, or run further in the opposite direction of camp. I chose to risk it and creep past the area above me where I could hear them, and then I ran faster than I thought was even possible. I was almost back to camp and starting to slow down and feeling a little safer, when I saw a different kind of bear....bare skin that is. Let's just say there were two people in the middle of the trail with bare skin. So I jumped over them and thought, "Hope the bears don't get them." I promise you this is an totally true and a reminder that indeed my life continues to get stranger and stranger. I'm glad to be alive and have a new found respect for bears. Later in the festival we were asked to join a friend's band on stage to hoop it up and though I was nervous in front a thousand people I thought about my bears and jumped in stage, you only live once after all...