I did a 10-day trek through Yellowstone a couple years ago with two of my closest friends and four other women, one of whom was our guide. It’s super unusual to see any bears at all while you’re there, but we saw THREE. We came across the first one in the first 20 minutes of the trip. Following the advice of our guide, we were noisy as hell, singing Xmas songs at the tops of our lungs to let them know we weren’t to be messed with. All of these bears steered clear of us, including the one that tried to come into our campsite to steal snacks on the fourth day.

Fast forward to something like the 6th day, we came across a couple of men in one of the hot springs along the way. We’d covered several miles that day, and we were exhausted, eager to ditch our 40 lb packs and thrilled to get in the water and rest for a bit. Even though we were mindful about following hiker etiquette by choosing a different area of the spring, so as not to disturb them, one of the men immediately swam over to us, placing himself firmly in the midst of a bunch of half dressed women. He was relentless about trying to talk us into coming back to the springs “after dark.” We said no several times, relating that we still had another 700 feet of elevation to hike before we’d get to our campsite.

We parted ways, hiked onward, and about an hour after arriving at our campsite and setting up, as some of us were literally undressing and washing ourselves off in a stream, this same guy walks into our site (a huge faux pas under any circumstances) and just won’t take a polite hint. He’s still asking us to join him at the springs after dark, mentions that he has some booze and some weed, etc. Someone even said to him, “Hey man, we covered a lot of ground today, we just wanna get cleaned up and rest.” He looked her dead in the eyes, then sat down on a rock and kept talking. The friend he was with tried several times to pull him away, saying things like, “Bro, let’s head on out.” Eventually, his friend got embarrassed enough to walk off without him, and that’s ultimately what made him decide to leave, still saying on his way out, “If you ladies change your mind…”

If you think it ended there, every woman reading this knows it didn’t. We crawled into our tents that night with the knowledge that there was a man out there who really wanted our attention, a man we (as politely as possible) rejected, who knows where we’re sleeping, who could possibly have a weapon on him (bears don’t carry knives or guns). If he was that brazen with a group of women, I could only imagine how much more “insistent” he might have been if one of us had been alone, or even if there’d only been two of us. All of those thoughts were far more terrifying than any of the bears (that we felt an actual privilege to witness) out in the wild.