I would like to introduce our “au pair-team Finland” member Kaisa
and share her “extraordinary” running experience out in the Colorado
mountains. Everything is possible when you are a Cultural Care au pair!
It was a long warm summer in Vail, CO where my host family
lives. I was spending the last two months of my au pair year and enjoying the last bits
of what I possibly could. Days turned into weeks and finally months and after
having decided to leave the USA to go back to Finland, I decided I need to step
it up and experience as much as possible. My host family had been away for four
weeks for summer vacation and I stayed behind to watch over the house (and the
cat and the dog). It was wonderful, no rush. I got to wake up whenever I
wanted, got to drive anywhere and eat whatever, all in this wonderful silence
in the house. Although at that point I remember it was very strange because
there was no hassle anywhere in the house as there usually was.
One sunny and relatively hot day (even in Colorado
standards), I decided to drive to Beaver Creek Village and go for a run up the
Beaver Creek Mountain. I parked the car in the nearest parking lot and
only took with me my music player and car keys. Phone and water bottle were
left in the car. I walked up where the skiing slopes started, and picked the
one that had the smallest pitch up. Tell you one thing though: it was NOT as easy
as I thought it would be, running up the slopes you normally would come down.
Anyway, I ran up only for 10 minutes because it was
exhausting. I stopped up where I had run to take a short breath and then head
back down running. I had literally no thoughts running through my mind at that
point. I took couple of turns and when I was facing the last stretch of my path
I saw it. Something big, black standing approximately 50 meters away from me.
My heart stopped when I realized it was a black bear!!!
At that moment, my legs just stopped, I was standing there
watching it standing on the pathway. My heart must have stopped or at least
skipped couple of beats. Suddenly, I had thousands of things running through my
mind. What should I do? I don’t have a phone. I wish I will make this. Don’t
run. Don’t run, keep calm. Literally I can say, I thought of my mom and that
this was probably the end of my story. The common sense started to appear, do
not run. I stood there waiting for him or her to go away, I stood there quiet,
even stopped my music so I could concentrate. I was trying to figure out
whether the bear was a mama bear with cubs or something else, but how could I've really known in the mode of panic. Could not decide upon it, but since
there was no cubs anywhere to be seen or heard, I thought maybe it’s not a mama
bear.
We both stood there for 5 minutes just standing but it felt
like forever in my mind. The bear suddenly turned its head towards me, looking
each other eye to eye. This was the first time it noticed me there. And after
it turned its head back and vanished in the woods below the path. I took a
deepest breath ever as I managed to face a bear! My legs were shaking like
crazy but the problems were not over, because it had gone down near the path
where I was supposed to run back down to the village. I thought immediately
that that path is a way too risky a choice for me to take. I scoured the
options I had; either that path or a muddy, rocky, very steep hill down to the
village right next to the woods. And it took me little time to make a decision,
I just needed to get back down to safety.
The feeling of exhaustion was long gone and the adrenaline
was flowing as I ran through the steep hill back down to the garage where I
parked. Immediately when I got back down to the main road, I felt a huge amount
of relief and how lucky I was not having a bear attack me. At the car, I had to
sit down for almost twenty minutes to calm down and to be able to drive as my
legs were shaking and heart pounding like crazy. The whole experience gave me
more strength, but it also was one of the scariest moments in my entire life,
even now it still is. I felt that I had conquered the world at that moment I
got back down, that good that I started to cry. Definitely, this was the most
eye-opening experience I had out on the Rockies, but it was yet another story
to tell to friends and family.
Aaaand no, my mom did not like the idea of me taking on a
bear and forbade me to get up there again. I did though, on another part of the
mountain.
