Berry Pickers Facing Beary Bad Harvest

Huckleberry lovers are in a funk this summer.

“We haven’t baked a huckleberry pie in three weeks,” said Linda Go of Huckleberry Delight in Priest River.

“We worked really hard to build up our pie business over the past two years, but the shortage of berries has forced us to put anything we can get into our other products, such as jams, candy and milk shakes.”

Lowland berries were fairly abundant in early July. But the high-country crop, where the bulk of the harvest occurs, is spotty at best.

Stan Simonik of the Huckleberry Haus at Priest Lake said plenty of pastries will be available at the lake’s annual Huckleberry Festival this weekend. But don’t expect the usual number of pies.

“It takes a quart of berries to make a good pie, and when huckleberries are scarce, that’s a problem,” he said.

People in the huckleberry business fill their freezers to capacity during a good berry year so they have a surplus to carry them through the inevitable bad season.

“But this is the second bad berry year in a row,” Simonik said.

Makers of huckleberry products are paying at least 50 percent more than they would in a normal year - up to $24 a gallon - to get berries from pickers who are scratching to break even this year on the mountain slopes.

Unfortunately, some creatures that depend on berries can’t just dig deeper in their pocket during a scarce berry year.

Consider the bears.

Grizzlies and black bears walk a narrow path of survival. A berry shortage forces them to be more resourceful or they will starve. But if they’re too resourceful, they get shot.

We can blame Mother Nature for the berry shortage. But we have no one but ourselves to blame for the bears that are dispatched each year simply because people are selfish, lazy and stupid in the woods.

From Olympic National Park to Yellowstone, bears are being destroyed this summer because campers won’t properly store their food.

A darling blonde black bear had to be shot last week in the Bob Marshall Wilderness because a backpacker didn’t hang food properly in a tree.

Another black bear had to be shot this week after pillaging coolers and cars at Spruce Tree Campground on the St. Joe River.

The shortage of berries appears to be forcing bears to move more and take risks they wouldn’t normally take. Once they get a taste of peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips, however, there’s little hope they’ll willingly go back to roots, bugs and berries.

Priest Lake, the region’s classic summer playground, is a hot spot for bear woes.

Last year, 21 bears had to be trapped and relocated after they were lured to a garbage dump near Nordman. The problem intensified when people began gathering there at night, increasing their viewing pleasure by offering even more food for the bruins.

Authorities have installed fence and a new dumpster to control that problem. The Forest Service also has installed bear-proof dumpsters at campgrounds.

But where there’s a will to be stupid, there’s a way.

“We caught some campers last year putting marshmallows around the bear-proof dumpsters so they could watch the bears,” said Tim Layser of the Priest Lake Ranger District. “You want to shake them.”

A few weeks ago, Layser caught people feeding a bear at Ledgewood Campground. “They said the bear looked so hungry and had a sad look on its face,” he said.

The bear probably looked sad again when a tranquilizer dart stung its butt.

“People have this perception that black bears are cuddly and harmless,” Layser said. “But there’s a major safety issue here. The people who feed the bear might not have a problem, but the next people to use the campsite could have a disaster.”

A few campers have been evicted from the campgrounds after feeding bears this year, he said. But by that time, the damage has been done.

This year, from July 4-25, state authorities handled 15 bears in the Priest Lake area, according to Idaho Fish and Game Department records. Two were shot and killed, including a bear addicted to camper food at Luby Bay campground. Another bear died from a reaction to a tranquilizer. The other 12 were trapped and relocated.

The average travel cost to relocate a bear in the Priest Lake area is $237, department records show.

You figure the total for that two-week effort.

Meanwhile, anyone who has picked huckleberries for long knows that even the worst crop years provide some isolated high-country patches where the berries are thick.

Simonik, who has literally written the book on huckleberries in North Idaho, knows where some of these patches are.

“I won’t send people to those spots because they’re in bear territory,” he said. “You have to be very careful, especially with grizzlies.”

In a year like this, people with a clue should take care of their own food and leave the berries to the bears.