Imagine you’re in Letchworth State Park one quiet winter morning, enjoying the dramatic views and wooded trails in “the Grand Canyon of the East” – and a black bear walks right in front of your car.

Grand Canyon? More like Yellowstone.

But it happened just the other day, to Mike Vanname. And he got it on camera.

For Vanname, Letchworth State Park on the Genesee River is his go-to place. So on the morning of January 6, he drove to Letchwork from his home in nearby Silver Springs, planning a short winter hike to clear his head before going to work. After his hike, Mike got back in his car and headed for the Castile exit. As he drove along, he noticed movement in the woods to his left behind the area known as Archery Field. He assumed it was deer.

It wasn’t. To his astonishment, a young black bear walked through the field and ambled across the road about 30 feet in front of his car. He grabbed his phone and started snapping.

When he related the story to us a week later, Mike was still happily stunned by what he’d witnessed. “It made my day. It made me really, really excited,” he said.

Kelly Raab, a wildlife technician for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, told us there a handful of black bears living in the 22-square-mile park. While common wisdom is that bears hibernate all winter, Kelly said that’s not the case. Adult and adolescent black bears sometimes emerge from dens to look for food, especially when weather warms. As it happens, the day Mike encountered the bears marked the beginning of a warm January thaw.

Kelly said the smallish bear captured in the photo sounded like a yearling, born last January – and still living with its mother.  And as it turns out, Mike saw Mama Bear too. He didn’t get a photo of her as she ambled by, but he did follow the two bears – cautiously – as they moved into a wooded area off the road.

There, he captured a delightful bit of video in which the yearling rumbles playfully down a snowy hillside and Mama peers out from behind a tree to keep an eye on her offspring.

Moments later, the bears clambered over the edge of the gorge and disappeared from view. The unusual winter appearance of a bear in Letchwork State Park was over, leaving Mike with the memory, and photos, of a lifetime.

“Being all these years at the park, I’ve never once seen a bear, and I’m 43 years old,” he told us. “I think that’s what was so exciting.” That is not surprising. Of the 6,000 to 8,000 bears estimated to live in areas open to hunting, most are in the Adirondacks and Catskills. NYSDEC estimates about 10-15% are located in central and western NY.

Aren’t we lucky that these wild creatures are present in our very own Genesee River Basin?

Read more about Black Bears

Read more in the ‘Winter on the River’ series

Video by Mike Vanname / Edits by Genesee RiverWatch / Music by Nikita Kondrashev from Pixabay