Bear (Croatia)

To put this sighting in context, we had spent 3 lovely days hiking in the Northern Velebit National Park national park in Croatia, it had been beautiful, but apart from a brief sighting of two deer from a large distance away we hadn’t seen any wildlife. We were moving on and so had left the park. It was quite early in the morning and due to the remote location of the park there was little artificial noise.  About 100m beyond the front gate we stopped suddenly when we heard noise from our left. Moments later the was more noise as a large bear crashed down the steep bank and started to amble across the road. It paused briefly in the middle of the road and glared at us as we sat perhaps 10m away. It then ambled across the rest of the road and crashed down an equally steep bank. At this point I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the road and looked down into the dark of the forest. The bear had not moved from the bottom of the bank, and he turned his head and fixed me with a stare for a few seconds before disappearing further into the gloom of the forest.