2016 - A friendly bear, several owls, but no deer
November 15, 2016 • Voyageur Press
HEDBOM TRAIL, Minn. — For more than 40 years, Rob Nowak, Scott Mathison, Mark Johnson and Matthew Johnson have made the annual trip to their hunting camp along Hedbom Forest Trail Road between Big Sandy Lake and Floodwood. Over the years, the group has enjoyed plenty of successful deer hunts, memorable stories and time together in the woods.
This year, however, the hunting party had a different reason to remember the season: a young bear wandered into camp and stuck around.
Scott Mathison recalled the moment the unexpected visitor first appeared.
“We were just sitting around camp that first night,” he said. “Matthew was looking around and said, ‘There’s a bear.’”
“We said, ‘Yeah, right,’” Rob Nowak recalled. “By God, there is. He just wandered right into camp and didn’t care that we were here.”
The young bear appeared to be hungry and possibly dehydrated, and it didn't seem particularly concerned about the hunters' presence.
“In the morning, he was standing on the top of our grill licking the cleaning brush like a lollipop,” Mathison said. “He was trying not to fall.”
At first, the hunters wondered whether the bear's mother might soon appear. The possibility kept the group on edge, but the mother never showed up. They speculated that she might have been killed, although they had no way to know for certain.
The group eventually gave their visitor a name: Boomer, inspired by the Hedbom Forest Trail Road camp location. Whether Boomer was male or female remained a mystery, as none of the hunters was willing to get close enough to find out.
While the bear provided plenty of entertainment, the hunting party's history stretches back decades.
“My dad started coming here,” Nowak said of the camp's beginnings in 1973. “We’ve just been coming here ever since. We come up here every year and have a lot of fun.”
Over the years, Nowak has harvested the most deer at the camp, while his father claimed a couple of the biggest, including two impressive 12-pointers.
“We’ve shot several deer here over the years,” Nowak said.
Some of the group's most memorable stories involve the lengths hunters have gone to retrieve their deer.
One tale features a camp member named Bud, who shot a deer on one of the islands and had to wade through nearly freezing water to recover it.
“He took his pants off, walked through the water that has to be about 33 degrees — not quite frozen yet — and got that deer and brought it back,” Mathison recalled.
The camp once had a larger group of hunters, and one year, 10 deer hung at camp. Another memorable episode involved transporting a deer in a hatchback car.
“Oh, and let’s not forget about the deer we hauled in the car with a hatchback,” Mathison added.
The group's outdoor adventures extend beyond the November rifle season. Before deer season begins, the Twin Cities hunters also make the trip north to hunt grouse.
For them, the annual getaway is about more than filling a tag. It's a chance to escape the city, enjoy the outdoors and share time with friends. This year, the hunters also found themselves listening to an unusual chorus in the woods.
“We’ve never heard so many owls before,” Nowak said.
And then there was Boomer, who quickly became an unexpected part of camp life.
“It has been really neat,” Mathison said. “I only hunted for an hour and a half today because I had to come back, check on the camp and give ‘Boomer’ some food. Then, the rest of the day he took a nap out back.”
Editor’s note: After the hunters left camp, questions arose about Boomer’s welfare and whether the bear needed to be rescued. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources officials advised that, in most cases, leaving a bear alone is the best course of action. Feeding bears can cause them to become accustomed to humans and dependent on people for food. The young bear appeared old enough to survive on its own, and we hope Boomer continued to thrive in the wild.