We'd heard that due to the relatively dry winter and lack of food there had been three times as many bear incidents in Yosemite Valley than last year.  Our experiences seemed to support these statistics. 

We arrived around 2pm, and the kids quickly went to play in the Merced river with Kathy and Karin.  Two hours after we arrived we saw a black bear wander through the campground toward the river.  Kathy then saw the bear wander across the Merced, but CJ & Robby both missed the seeing it.  

While lounging around after our grilled salmon dinner at about 9pm we heard people banging on pots and pans a few campsites away from us.  We had most of the food back in the bear box, but it wasn't shut.  I marched over to the bear box to shut it and was confronted by a rather large black bear right in back of our bear box.  He had seen that the doors to the bear box weren't shut and was on his way to help himself to our food (and beer!).  I began yelling at it loudly and kept my flashlight beam pointed directly in his face - at this point I was no more than 6-8 feet away from the bear, and had placed myself between him and the front of the bear box.  After a few seconds he decided to find a less aggressively defended meal and turned tail.  Seeing two bears within 5 hours seemed to indicate there really were more bears in Yosemite Valley this year.

Kathy woke up sometime around 1am for some reason and woke me up.  It was quite, and the only light was the light of the rest rooms a few hundred feet from our tent.  Suddenly we saw the distinctive shadow of a bear on our tent as it walked somewhere between our tent and the restrooms.  A few seconds later we saw it walk the other direction.  I assumed it was on the road, which was about 10 feet from the tent.  I got out to chase the bear away, but by the time I got dress and out of the tent it was gone.  Later experiments conducted with CJ filling in for the bear indicated that the bear was actually not on the road, but rather within 5 feet of the tent, based on the clarity of the bear's shadow.