Next time you take to the trails around Jasper, look to your left, then look to your right. Odds are good you’ll spot a buffalo berry bush. And as experienced mountain travelers know, with berries come bears.

Parks Canada is advising trail users throughout Jasper National Park to be wary of bear activity at lower elevations with the berry crop ripening into all its delicious goodness. The small red or yellow berries are a favourite food of both grizzly and black bears, and they will be feasting wherever they find a suitable source. In many cases, that will put the ursine population in direct contact with hikers, mountain bikers, and trail riders alike.

Wildlife Conflict Specialist Wes Bradford reported that last weekend was a very busy time for bear encounters in the park. A female black bear with cubs bluff charged hikers on Trail 2b on Pyramid Bench, and a mountain biker received a similar scare from a grizzly along the Overlander Trail. Meanwhile, a hiking party near the fifth lake at Valley of the Five Lakes encountered a solo black bear.

“Anytime we have a big buffalo berry crop, bears are seeking those food sources, and with so many park visitors, there will be more encounters,” Bradford said. It’s so likely, in fact, and the berry bushes are so prolific in the valley bottoms, that Bradford said a mass awareness campaign is more effective than any other.

“It’s almost impossible to post a bear warning on every trail, so it’s important to get the general message out there.”

That message? Proceed with caution, look for fresh bear sign, make noise and, if possible, travel in a group. It’s particularly important to be noisy and vigilant in areas with berry growth, because foraging bears are far less attentive than usual, Bradford added.

“Guaranteed, if they’ve got their face in that berry bush, they won’t notice people coming. Often times they’re sitting on their butts and feeding, gathering the bushes with their limbs. It’s not like a bear going along snipping at dandelions, they’d be much more attentive.”

The buffalo berry bushes are unmistakable, with the bright red fruit standing out in a canopy of green. The berries are about half the size of a grape, and the orange-yellow specimens are ready for bruin buffets too, they just happen to be a different genotype than the red berries.

The berry crop typically ripens in the Athabasca Valley by the middle of August, but a very hot period followed by substantial moisture provided the perfect growing conditions for an early harvest by four-legged omnivores this summer.

“We had ripe berries near Pocohontas by June 23 and now we’ve got them all over the place,” Bradford said. There are no particular areas to avoid or to be aware of. If you’re on a trail at lower elevations, bears will be around. Fortunately, the berry season provides more obvious signs of bear activity than the regular search for tracks or scat. First of all, the mulch-mower style in which the bears consume the buffalo berries leaves a pretty evident trail of destruction.

“You’ll see bushes knocked over, branches knawed off,” Bradford said. “You’ll see the grass matted down, too.”

What’s more, the bright red berry seeds show up in the bear’s scat, which suddenly doesn’t blend in to the trail quite as well.

If you do see a bear foraging, there are essentially two options, Bradford said.

“You can either skirt around it, or turn around and head home. People are going to be seeing bears, no doubt about it.”

Parks Canada has been experimenting with eradication of berry bushes around the Wabasso Campground for the past three years, and despite some considerable success there, Bradford doesn’t foresee expanding the program to other areas of the park.

“There were several concerns at Wabasso,” he explained. “There was unbelievable buffalo berry production there, which led to bear problems in the campground, and our reaction time isn’t as quick as it is for the nearer campgrounds to go in and haze the bear out of there.”

Clearing berry bushes has led to a 70 per cent drop in reported bear incidents at Wabasso, but there’s no way of knowing where it could work along trails, for instance.

“It would be very difficult to implement a program because not every bush produces berries every year,” Bradford said. “Plus, the bushes recuperate after about five years, even where they are removed.”

As a result, it’s just that much more important to be aware of your surroundings on the trails for the rest of the summer. Hey, it could be worse, according to Bradford.

“Last year’s crop was actually a little better than this year’s,” he said. “It was the biggest I’d seen in 25 years.”