Please join us to help make the 53rd McCleary Bear Festival a huge success!

Home of the famous bear stew

The McCleary Bear Festival Was dreamed up in 1958 by Norman Porter, then editor of the McCleary Stimulator, the home town newspaper. It wasn't that he disliked bears, but he and other residents of this area knew that bears liked to eat the soft cambium layer of the inner bark of young evergreen trees. They especially crave this delicacy when they emerge from hibernation, and to satisfy their hunger they often strip a tree of all its bark, causing it to die, It started with a remark by a friend of Porter's by the name of Roy Craft, then editor of the Skamania County Pioneer in Stevenson, Washington, who claimed that Skamania bears, if properly cooked, were the world's most delicious. Porter countered with the claim that Grays Harbor's bears were the tops. The two agreed to meet head-on in a bear-tasting contest in McCleary. Civic minded McClearians got interested, formed committees and decided to stage something more than just a bear-eating contest. Working with Porter, they created the First Annual Second Growth and Bear Festival. It not only helped to rid the forests of unwanted surplus bears, but also supplied the Festival with bear for the barbecue...

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