Lava Bear

In May 1917 a sheepherder named O. T. McKendree, tending flocks in northern Lake County, Oregon, saw his dog barking up a juniper tree. The animal he shot proved to be a bear, but a tiny one, about 23 pounds by his estimate, with woolly fur the color of buckskin. A taxidermist in The Dalles mounted it, and it went on display in a Lakeview drugstore, where a local man photographed it for the Oregon Sportsman. Within months, people were talking about a separate species of dwarf bear living in the black lava beds around Fort Rock.

The stories grew fast. Some old-timers said the little bears were a cross between a black bear and a grizzly, some said a bear shrunk by the barren lava country, and the humorist Irvin S. Cobb, who came out to hunt one in 1920, wrote in the Saturday Evening Post that it might even descend from the Asian sun bear. Cobb never found one, but his article made the animal famous. Trappers brought in more: in 1923 and 1924 a government trapper named Alfred Andrews took one dead and one alive, and the live bear was exhibited in Portland, Bend and Klamath Falls before it vanished while on tour. Further captures followed in 1924, 1933 and 1934.

Scientists never accepted a new species. The biologist C. Hart Merriam, who studied the mounted 1917 bear, judged it an immature, possibly abnormal black bear, and the Oregon wildlife biologist Stanley Jewett wrote in 1922 that, for all his searching, he had found only common black bears and grizzlies in the region, and that the bears killed there since 1917 had been normal black bears. The accepted explanation is that the “lava bears” were cubs and underfed small adults, stunted by poor forage in a dry, rocky landscape.

The legend lives on in Bend, where the high school chose the Lava Bear as its mascot in 1924, soon after a live specimen was shown in town, and where it remains the name of the school’s teams.

A bear far smaller than a normal adult: about 17 to 30 inches long, 12 to 18 inches high and 23 to 35 pounds, with woolly light-brown or buckskin fur, sometimes described as sandy or yellowish.

The lava fields, juniper flats and dry lakebeds of the northern Great Basin in central Oregon: the Fort Rock and Fossil Lake country, Summer Lake and Crescent Lake, with a final capture near Scar Mountain in the Cascades.

The lava bear is one of the Pacific Northwest’s better-documented near-miss cryptids, a mystery that traced back to a real mounted animal. Bend Senior High School adopted the Lava Bear as its team mascot in 1924, and a 2013 statewide Oregonian poll chose the Bend Lava Bears as Oregon’s best mascot for the largest schools. A bear sculpture, Grizzly (2001), stands in a roundabout on Bend’s east side a block from the school.