Most folks, in our experience, worry about crowds, thieving seagulls and the local sea (or in this case, lake) life when they're at the beach. That wasn't the case last week at California's Lake Tahoe, where beachgoers had to make way for a family of vacationing black bears.
In a video that's rapidly gone viral, a sow and her two cubs playfully splash around in the surf just a few yards from shore. That bears are swimming during a hot summer isn't surprising. That a sow was willing to walk her cubs down through a crowded beach, and didn't much mind the presence of nearby paddle boarders? That raises an eyebrow, at least. The trio is presumably local, and we'd wager the sow's grown confident that she has little to fear from the strange, hairless pedestrians that visit the lake. It's not until the group is on their way back to the tree line—by which point a rather large crowd has started to gather—that the sow looks like she's growing a bit wary. All was well in the end, though—local news reported that the bears left without incident.
What else can we say, really? It's beach season, folks.
Watch further coverage of the beach-going bears here and here.
