An Almost Wasted Tag: A Spring Bear Hunt in the Cascades
It was late afternoon when I closed the door to my van and headed into the burn scar in Willamette National Forest outside of Oakridge. It was late spring, the end of May, and everything was coming back to life from last year’s long, cold winter. Snow still lingered in the high peaks of the Cascades, but below about 6,000 feet, the snow had melted, traveling from the sky to the tops of mountains, to the nearby rivers, feeding the grass, the flowers, and other flora and fauna along the way.
I was there in search of a black bear, Oregon being one of eight states that has a spring hunting season for such. Spring bear season in Oregon, like many tags in the American West, is a controlled, limited entry tag. State biologists study each subset of a population of game animals in segmented geographical locations known as a unit, collecting data about how many animals can be taken without causing harm to the population. In general, harvesting males has little to no impact on an animal population, who will breed with pretty much every female in the area regardless of the male to female ratio.
These biologists then look at success rates of hunters and come up with an appropriate tag allotment for each unit. The likelihood of drawing increases by how many points the hunter has, being awarded one point per species for year. There are some units in Oregon that are essentially once in a lifetime draws for elk or mule deer, mostly in the Northeastern part of the state. Some people have been waiting over 20 years to draw tags to hunt elk there.
Bears have healthy populations in most of Oregon. Some estimates put the population at between 25,000 and 30,000 animals, so it is not very difficult to draw a tag in most units. I have drawn one every year since I’ve moved here in 2020. Despite the ease of drawing, there are strict rules about hunting bears.
You are allowed to shoot a male bear, a boar, or a female bear, a sow, but you are expected to ensure the female does not have any cubs in tow. Shooting a cub or shooting a bear in its den is illegal. Baiting or using dogs to hunt bears has been illegal in Oregon since 1994 via ballot initiative. All edible portions of meat must be taken as well along with proof of sex. You also must submit the skull to Oregon Fish and Wildlife so biologists can remove a tooth to age the bear. If you shoot a female, you are encouraged to remove the reproductive tract and submit it to a biologist, but this is not required by law.
The Southwest tag in the Coast Range is the easiest tag to draw for spring bear and the one with the highest population of bears and success rate. I had spent years hunting the Coast Range, driving and walking hundreds of miles through the private timberland that encompasses a large percentage of western Oregon, land owned by Weyerhaeuser, Roseburg Timber, Stimson Lumber, Lewis and Clark Timber, and so on.
Much of the land there is checkerboard, a combination of private and public owned land intentionally carved up that way by the United States government to incentivize the railroad companies to expand Westward, giving them just enough land to build the railroads cheaply while maintaining just enough of the land that the government could still control the areas if deemed necessary. Most of this land is now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, or the BLM.
But I had grown weary of staring at recently replanted four-foot-tall trees known as “reprod” and of looking for critters that like to feed on the grasses that grow there. I had grown tired of glassing into the regrowth of trees for so long that the kaleidoscopic patterns made by neatly planted trees seemed to move on their own, and even more tired of debating the ethics of timber country in my mind as I hiked through blackberry brambles, crunched through the brush and trash left behind, watched the mounds of slash smoldering in the distance, and listened to the omnipresent hum of faraway heavy machinery.
I wanted to get away from that this year, so I put in for a Cascades tag in an area I had never hunted before in the McKenzie unit, knowing I would see less bears, less people and no heavy machinery. I knew that at the very least, I would get some nice hiking in. This all sounded just fine to me.
I hiked into the burn scar a ways and set up for the evening. I could see for miles in every direction with my spotting scope, a high-powered optic stronger than binoculars. I looked for movement between the stumps and burned-out trees, the standing dead, hoping for a black stump to suddenly lift its head, to form ears and a mouth seemingly out of nonexistence and into being.
A 127,000 acre piece of this national forest burned in the Cedar Creek fire in 2022. It was caused by a lightning strike and burned entirely on national forest land. Large wildfires like this are becoming more commonplace, but the reasons behind the trend are hotly debated, pun intended. Advocates for increased logging argue that decades of limited timber harvest have allowed fuel, dead trees and dense undergrowth to accumulate, making forests more prone to severe fires. Critics of this view point out that these same groups often support reducing funding for public land management, do not support thinning practices, and in some cases favor privatization. This area in particular was marked in an attempted public land sale in 2025 that never came to be.
On the other hand, environmental organizations often attribute the rise in wildfire activity primarily to climate change, citing hotter, drier conditions and longer fire seasons. However, this perspective can sometimes underemphasize the role that active forest management, including selective logging and thinning, plays in reducing fire intensity in certain areas. It is also difficult for these organizations to get funding for thinning projects, especially on public land. Wildfire behavior is influenced by a combination of these factors, including climate conditions, forest management practices, and historical land use patterns.
The area to the north of this burn scar burned heavily in the summer when I had moved to Eugene from Upstate New York where there is almost no public land. My wife and I arrived only weeks before some of the largest wildfires in the Oregon Cascade’s history. It rained ash in Eugene and much of the Willamette Valley for days from these fires. Whenever we asked someone if this was normal and if we should be worried, they would always say they didn’t know; it had never happened before.
I went back to glassing, enjoying the spring day and hoping to turn up a bear munching on some grass. Contrary to many depictions of black bears, they are not bloodthirsty killers, especially this time of year. Many bears are just waking up in May, the disappearing snowline and longer daylight finally arousing them from their slumbers and telling them to feed. Once they awaken, they feed almost entirely on grass, skunk cabbage, grubs from stumps, and whatever winterkill they find defrosted in the melting snow. South facing slopes often get the most sunlight and get green up first, so bears tend to congregate in those areas.
I stayed until just after the sun slipped down behind the mountains. I saw nothing that night, and I had picked apart just about every south facing slope in the area. I headed back to the van under the moonlight and ran into a fellow hunter at the trailhead.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said. I was up above you a ways. Spent a couple days back there. I saw where you were. Never seen bears there, but I couldn’t tell you why.”
We chatted for a bit longer before he headed to his truck.
“Anyways, there’s a swamp with my name on it for tomorrow morning. Hoping for some last day magic!”
“Me too,” I said and wished him luck. He drove off in his beat-up Toyota Tundra.
I drove to a different area up higher in elevation near the snowline that had two open meadows on south-facing areas that I suspected would be green already. I slept in my van that night, feeling a little guilty that I had likely wasted a tag someone else could have put to better use.
I woke up after sunrise, made some breakfast, and headed up a nearby trail towards the meadows. Bears are not early birds, and I had accepted my fate that I would likely not even see any bear sign this year, let alone a bear. At least I could get a couple of days in the mountains, away from the stresses of work. The notifications on my phone seemed to never cease at that time of year.
I hiked in on a small trail into the treeline and into some old growth. When the tree canopy gets to be nearly impenetrable, sunlight cannot penetrate and the underbrush that many game species such as deer, elk, and even bear like to eat does not grow as well. As a result, many of these species have left areas where this occurs. The decline of the elk population in the Cascades in the last few decades has been drastic. Many people my age, 37, remember having no trouble finding elk outside of Oakridge as little as twenty years ago. Biologists do their population counts using infrared cameras from airplanes at night and count what they believe to be elk or deer by hand from the sky. On their last count, biologists put the elk population in the McKenzie unit at about 40% of their management objective.
Predators have a part in this, too, but just how much is debatable. Cougar and bear populations have increased drastically in the Cascades in the same time period as elk and deer populations have declined. Wolves in this area are believed to be transient, with one being spotted on McKenzie Pass a few weeks before writing. Wolves are still protected in Oregon but are not in several other states, including Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Their populations are considered recovered and were subsequently removed from the ESA. With that comes state management, and usually some kind of hunting season. Some say the wolf population is much higher than ODFW’s estimates of about 300 wolves, growing from a single breeding pair in 2009 that wandered into Oregon from Idaho.
Predator hunters are often the first in the crosshairs of anti-hunting organizations, many of whom are hellbent on outlawing hunting all together using a death by a thousand cuts approach. Public opinion of predator hunting hovers at about 40%, almost half of the support for hunting in general. The reasons for such are often multifaceted. There is a myth around bear meat being inedible, which it is not. All the bears I have eaten are much closer to beef than venison is, since there is actual fat content. There is very little gamey flavor as long as they haven’t been munching on anything too nasty, like rotten salmon. Bear meat does have to be cooked to at least 165 degrees to kill off any potential trichinosis in the meat, a parasite prevalent in predators, which adds some difficulties. It works well as a substitute for pork or with any beef recipe that’s slow-cooked, bear bourguignon being one of my personal favorites. Once rendered, bear fat is incredibly useful for cooking, frying, or even water-proofing boots and gear. It was very valuable during the colonial era when bears were considered prized table fare. The Molalla Tribe of the Cascades region, known for being proficient hunters and masters of archery, had been eating bear here for millennia prior to being removed from the area after a series of treaties in 1853-1855 in which they were forcibly removed to the Grand Ronde Reservation along with roughly thirty other tribes.
Anti-hunting groups use this claim that bears are inedible to say that people who hunt predators are trophy hunters and thrill killers, people who run around in the woods killing things for no other reason than bloodlust, leaving the bodies to rot after snapping a few blood-drenched photos. What they are describing is “wanton waste,” a felony in most western states, and is investigated whenever it is found. Every state is a little different, but in Oregon, the only game mammal you do not have to retrieve the meat for is a mountain lion, which has a thriving population in the state.
Even still, you are required to bring the entire animal to a biologist after killing one.
After about a mile, I reached the meadow I was looking for, the grass growing green and tall for the time of year. “If there was going to be a bear around, he’s going to be here,” I thought to myself.
I found a big pile of fresh scat right away in the middle of the meadow. It was from a big bear. It was in direct sunlight, meaning it would get crunchy and hard quickly. It was still wet. This bear was close, likely within a few hundred yards or less.I set up on the edge of the meadow upwind from where I believed the bear may be, down in some thicker stuff foraging for skunk cabbage. I took my predator call from my pocket and let it rip. The sound imitates a rabbit or small mammal being eaten by something and often attracts vultures, birds, coyotes, or bears. The screeching cacophony ripped through the silent air of the Cascades. I waited there for several hours, but the bear did not materialize.
I decided to hike in a little further, through some old growth and to the other much larger meadow. I was happy to find some deer sign, this area harboring a unique hybrid species between mule deer and blacktail called a benchleg.
I hung out on the edge of the meadow for the rest of the day and cooked up some antelope summer sausage from the previous year’s hunt in Wyoming. About an hour before dusk, I decided to head back to the van, accepting my fate that I had wasted a tag.
It was a short hike back, and I quickly found myself approaching the first meadow. I decided to move quietly and slowly for the last hundred yards or so, as best practice just in case luck was on my side. It was.
There was a giant boar standing in the meadow, feeding on grass, some 50 yards from where I had been earlier in the day. I ranged the bear. 78 yards. I set up my rifle and tripod to shoot off of and looked at him in the scope. He was a big, nasty-looking, mature boar. Boars of that size often terrorize females and kill and eat their cubs. This forces the female back into heat so he can breed the female again and spread his genes. Removing boars from a population can actually increase the number of bears in the area, rather than decrease them due to this fact.
I checked my watch. Twenty minutes of shooting light left. I chambered a round and slowed my breathing. I’d need him to take about ten steps to the right for a clear shot. I barely finished the thought, when he did exactly that. He stood broadside and I fired two quick shots into him, dropping him where he stood. With nineteen minutes of the season left, I shot my first bear, and a great one at that.
I sat with him for a while in the dark before butchering him, running my hands through his fur and putting my hands on his enormous head. I grappled with why shooting a bear felt different than shooting a cervid, deer and elk, of which I had shot many. Some people say they resemble humans when skinned or their bodies remind them of dogs. Some indigenous cultures regard them as a spiritually “heavy” meal; that they are, in fact, closer to the human world than other animals. Maybe charismatic megafauna, or animals that are big, perceived as cute and often anthropomorphized, and the framing of which animals are edible and which are not based on what can be farmed from them shaped my thinking, too. Maybe it was all of these things. I never take killing lightly, but I do not live under the illusion of any diet being truly cruelty free. For me, after a brief stint with vegetarianism, hunting became the obvious solution to clean meat eating.
Whatever it was, I quartered out the bear, taking all edible portions, packed them into game bags, looking forward to the many meals the bear would provide. There was very little fat on the bear, which suggests he had not been awake for long.
I hiked the pieces out down back to the van in one, heavy trip, my body back bent over like some old hobbit from Lord of the Rings. As I hiked, I thought about the life this animal lived in the Cascades, wild and free. ODFW aged my bear at eight years old by counting the rings on one of his teeth, which is considered to be middle-aged. Back at the van, I loaded the meat and my gear up and drove down the mountain towards home, happy about my almost wasted tag and to have this level of wilderness just a short drive away.
Benjamin Burgholzer is an enthusiast of wild foods and wild places, a small business owner, and freelance writer. When he is not working or writing, he spends as much time as possible in the mountains of Oregon. Read more from Ben on Substack at @benjaminburgholzerphd and find him online on Instagram at @benjaminburgholzer