As students in the class I teach at Minnesota State University handed in their midterms and headed out the door for the spring break, I asked if any had any special travel plans.

A few were headed to pleasantly warm destinations like Mexico or South Padre Island. Many were just planning on sticking around Minnesota and just “chilling” if you’ll excuse the pun.

But one young man said he and a couple of buddies were going to pile into a car and just start heading south, letting the road and their finances guide them where ever.

I admired his sense of adventure.

Nearly forty years ago, under similar circumstances, a couple of buddies and I hatched a plan for an archery spring bear hunt in northeastern Minnesota.

At that unenlightened time, black bears were an unprotected species in Minnesota and fair game year-round.

Another sign of the unenlightened times, to “hunt” them sometimes meant staking out a city dump and bagging a bruin as it rummaged and rattled through the tin cans and other garbage — kind of like hunting over the ultimate bait station.

So with college classes dismissed for spring break, we piled our camping and hunting gear into my friend’s 1963 Mercury Comet and set the compass due northeast.

We had no specific destination in mind, knew nothing about bear hunting except to get deep into the woods where we presumed the bears would be obligingly wandering around, groggy after a winter of deep sleep.

Now, anyone who has ever traveled Minnesota’s entire depth can attest to just how varied and contrasting the state’s geography is.

The same holds true meteorologically, as well.

When we left southwest Minnesota, the countryside was bereft of snow with balmy temperatures in the 70s, even the 80s.

By the time we reached Duluth, the temperature was as cold as the snow was deep. The Comet finally foundered on a desolate, muddy, gravel road someplace east of Cotton, Minn.

A few feet into the woods, the snow was still thigh-deep so we pitched our tent on a bare patch a few feet from the road. In a fashion, we officially were bear hunting.

Of course, as deep as the snow was, we quickly realized that no self-respecting bear would be wandering through such wintery conditions.