Sure enough, after hiking a couple miles uphill and hacking through some brush, we found the place just as he had described it.

All of this made me have to conclude that those dummies just didn’t know what they were doing. It was a couple of years later before the solution for this puzzle became clear to me.

My next strategy was to walk anywhere and everywhere that I had been inside this home and garage. I looked on the floor, in the bathroom, I checked the bathroom trash can, and I even pulled the shower curtain back and looked in the bathtub.

We started off excited and enthusiastic as we began hiking up the river, daydreaming about finding big gold.

I noticed an area which I could crawl through to keep going in a straight line. I got about three feet into the pile and Bob yelled for me to stop…

I learned the next day that I was not the only one that had crossed paths with a bear. Dick told us about his harrowing experience from the previous night.

He got out his new salt gun and began searching for the source of the intruder. He soon isolated the sound to a point in the rafters above the stove.