Bryan's Blog

They roared into town on their ‘Bearly-Davidsons’ and Big Dog choppers with their long hair, big teeth, and bad dispositions. The marauding motorcyclists invaded the self-proclaimed ‘Best River Town in America,’ a small community nestled in the Siskiyou Mountains called Grants Pass, Oregon, on Memorial Day, and haven’t left since. They first appeared at the town’s Boatnik festival and now have taken over the parking lot of the local newspaper, the Daily Courier. Men envy them. Women love them. But their greatest affect is on the kids in town whose eyes widen and jaws drop the first time they encounter “The Wild Bunch.”

With names like Iron Bear, The Bearinator, and Bearik Estrada, they ride a variety of Harley-Davidson, Big Dog, and custom motorcycles. One’s even got a big sidecar attached to his rig. These are riders that make Marlon Brando’s The Wild One character Johnny Strabler look like a sissy boy.

Okay, maybe they’re not as mean as they look. In fact, some of them wear permanent smiles. “The Wild Bunch” is actually a collection of 17 fiberglass bears mounted on motorcycles that have been painted by local artists for a yearly public art event called BearFest. A few years back, Evergreen Federal Bank and its president, Brady Adams, commissioned local artists to use their creativity to decorate a bunch of big fiberglass bears with different themes representative of life in Oregon and then spread them around the streets of Grants Pass for the community to enjoy.

BearFest 2010 continues that tradition, only this year they took it a step further and not only provided the artists with fiberglass bears but also provided them with motorcycles to mount their work on and to use as extended canvases. The bear on the sidecar utilizes the ‘Best River Town in America’ theme and features a painting of the two iconic bridges that span the Rogue River which bisects the town. The Bearinator is mounted on a red Big Dog chopper and is a cool interpretation of Terminator Arnie complete with a mechanical claw gripping the right handgrip, a robotic eye, and a hole where his heart should be that shows off his mechanical skeleton. One of my favorites is Bearik Estrada, a spitting image of the CHiPs star in his heyday, hair slicked back in his tan CHP uniform, complete with a Harley-Davidson police motorcycle.

Bearfest is billed as “a hands-on touchable art event, proving that art doesn’t have to be ‘serious’ to be great." So if you happen to be riding by Grants Pass on I-5 this summer, I recommend that you make a pit-stop in town to check out “The Wild Bunch” of “Bears on Harleys. Just remember, don’t feed the bears, no matter what Yogi says. And bring your camera.