Woman Witnesses Bear Bathing During Hike: ‘I’ll Never Recover From This’

A video of a woman spotting a bear “enjoying a cool dip in the pond” during a hike in Canada has captivated users on TikTok.

The moment was captured in a video posted by Sarah Boland (@bolandia) and has garnered over 657,000 views since it was first shared on October 17.

A note overlaid on the video reads: “I witnessed Winnie the Pooh taking a bath while I was hiking and I’ll never recover from this.”

The footage was captured in the Squamish area of the British Columbia province on a hike around the Elfin Lakes, where there were four bears, according to a later comment by the poster.

The video shows a bear sitting under the sun in a small pond in the middle of a forest. At one point, the bear is shown rubbing water on its face before dipping itself further down into the water. It later sits up and shakes water off itself.

A caption shared with the post simply reads: “Once in a lifetime experience.”

The hiker’s encounter is not surprising because Squamish is located in “prime bear habitat,” where bears are active from March to December, notes the website of the District of Squamish.

According to the district website, “bear activity typically increases in the fall as they expand their search for last-minute food sources.”

Preparing for hibernation in winter, a bear can eat for up to 20 hours a day, consuming up to 20,000 calories per day—the equivalent of a human eating 50 hamburgers per day—during this “hyper eating” phase, the district notes.

The key to staying safe from bears on trails is to “avoid surprise encounters” by doing the following, as advised by the district:

Make noise with your voice (talking, singing or shouting) when approaching a blind corner or going near rivers or natural bear food.
Moving quickly and quietly puts you at a higher risk for surprise encounters, so hikers are advised to slow down when going around blind corners and to make noise.
Look out for signs of recent bear activity, such as claw marks on trees, fresh scat, day beds, ripped-apart logs, or overturned boulders.
Hike in groups and be extra alert during the early morning and early evening hours.

The viral post comes as over 61 million people in the United States were reported to have engaged in hiking activities at least once in 2023. This marked a growth of around 89 percent since 2010, the highest number recorded in the country since then, according to data compiled by Statista, the global data firm.

Outdoor activity saw a rise after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, with new and returning outdoor participants having increased by 26 percent, according to a 2022 report from the Outdoor Industry Association.

In 2021, 164.2 million (54 percent) of Americans aged six and over participated in outdoor recreation at least once, “the highest number of participants on record,” the OIA report found.