Shredding the slopes can often be therapeutic, that is if you don’t have a bear chasing you down the entire mountain.
It definitely helps you to stay motivated and encourages proper form, because you wouldn’t want to get too cute as you are traversing the snow capped mountain with an apex predator waiting for you to make just one wrong move.
This video originates from Romania, which explains the foreign language that the guy is using to talk to the bear. Before he gets going down the mountain, he tries to convince the bear to give up before they even get started, saying:
“You are not allowed here. Can’t you understand that you are not allowed here? Go to the forest where you belong.”
That apparently doesn’t do it for the young brown bear, who remains interested in the skier, and maybe even wants to give “shredding the gnar” a try. You can briefly see a number of other skiers at the top of the slope who are probably waiting for the bear to vacate the area before they push off and head down the mountain.
So that’s when the person filming the encounter decides to play the hero, and invites the bear to follow him down the mountain in order to draw it away from everyone else. The skier says to the bear:
“That’s it. Good bye! Let’s make (this) a contest. Come after me.”
And as soon as the skis start to slide across the packed-down snow, the bear hones in on the man and begins to run full speed right after him. It doesn’t appear that there is any “hunting instinct” in this bear that is triggered, but rather a “let’s have some fun instinct,” if that is such a thing for wild animals.
As the man skis down the slope, the bear follows closely behind at full sprint. The guy manages to somehow stay up right while also filming behind him, catching the brown bear’s downhill chase on camera. It’s clearly a lot easier to slide down the mountain than it is to run, with the bear shaking its head and visibly tiring out as it tries to keep up.
The skier even trash talks the bear, laughing and yelling back at it:
“You are a lunatic. Can you still run? Can you?”
Now I’m no wildlife expert, but I am a believer in something called “bad juju.” Some of you might also know it as “karma,” where something that you say or do eventually comes back to bite you.
In this case, it would not be good if the bear decided to bite anyone, and the fact that the skier was just openly giving it crap for not being able to keep up worried me just a little bit. Personally, I think it would be best to be humble and avoid taunting the bear.
Thankfully, it all seemed to work out for the skier as he continued down the slope. He apparently comes into contact with some other shredders of the slope and warns them, going full super hero by telling them:
“Tell everyone to go down the valley. Go up front. I will stop the bear. No worries.”
You might as well call this guy Captain Romania. That’s one of the most badass things I’ve ever heard. He warns everyone, tells them that he will single handedly stop the bear, and then reassures them that there is nothing to worry about.
And in the end, there wasn’t. As the skier and the bear got close to the bottom of the mountain (a 4-minute ride/run), the young brown bear officially waives the white flag and gives up on the chase. The animal slides off the main skiing trail and starts to head into the woods.
I say “chase,” but I don’t think the bear was trying to do anything mean-spirited in this interaction. It looked to me like it just had some free time to kill and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
Only bad thing for it now is that it probably has to walk all the way back up to get home. I doubt they would let the brown bear use the ski lift to return to the top of the mountain…
Take a look at the video below:
