An Elk Burger, huckleberries and bear stuff everywhere

I don't know this for a fact, but I believe I ate my first Elk Burger today. It was at the Huckleberry Patch cafe and gift shop in Hungry Horse, Montana.

In Montana, Buffalo Burgers are often served in restaurants. I have already dined on a buffalo burger this trip. Buffalo tastes like beef. It's lean. Buffalo meat in a burger tastes pretty much the same as cow.

My Elk Burger was excellent. Truth be told, if someone told me I was eating a hamburger I wouldn't have known the difference.

The Huckleberry Patch has been around Hungry Horse since 1949, but it's under new owners in recent times. It's a nice place. It sells hundreds of tee-shirts, I bet half with bear or huckleberry themes. You can also buy any product imaginable made from huckleberries, which are the most famous berries in these parts. I bought some jam, but I was tempted by the huckleberry soda and huckleberry licorice. Hungry Horse, by the way, is known as the "Huckleberry Capital of the West."

BEAR DESIGNS ON TEE-SHIRTS are mostly cute bears. Bears are on everyone's mind around Hungry Horse, which is on the doorstep of Glacier National Park, where there are lots of Black and Grizzly Bears. The bears sometimes even walk through campgrounds. So you don't want to tie up your Pomeranian outside your RV while you take a nap. If you do, it could easily be "goodbye little fur ball."

The reason people think about bears is that rangers harp on you all the time to be careful. Bears eat people on occasion, which is nobody's idea of a good time.

About every other store in Hungry Horse or in the park itself sells a spray bottle of bear (pepper) spray for about $40. If you don't want to buy it, you can rent it for $5 a day. If you come across a bear and it looks mad, then you need to be careful and walk away. But if the bear comes after you, you will be glad to have the bear spray.

IN THE OLD DAYS rangers used to say wear bells when you are hiking in the woods. But now they say maybe that doesn't work. They now advise to talk a lot. Whistle. Make human noises. But don't say "Hello Bear, here I come" because someone on the trail ahead might hear the word bear and panic.

Grizzly Bears are the most dangerous. There are a lot of jokes about bears, but the ones that involve bells in the punch line are not as appropriate anymore now that nobody wears bells. One old joke about identifying bears advises to check out their poop on the trail. "Black bear droppings are smaller and contain berries and possibly squirrel fir," the joke goes. "Grizzly Bear droppings have bells in them and smell like pepper spray."

But back to my Elk Burger, it was very good and the price of $8.95 was not bad, considering it's not the kind of burger you get every day.