This is the bear that inspired my bear. The original is around 12 feet tall. Mine is considerably shorter, since it is just a cub.

As usual, I start with an internet search to find several pictures of my subject, showing it in different poses and from different angles. Found this one and knew the perfect place for it.

I have a couple of spires from an older discarded project (I'll get into that when I start discussing my several fountains I have built over the years). I wanted my bear to look like it is climbing on the spire so I needed to scale it to have the correct proportions to be placing it's paws on the spire. The spire is about 55 inches tall.

This shows the bear with the grid placed over it and scaled to the proper height to be climbing the spire.

This was another stryfoam project with an important lesson learned from my Toucky project ... NO AEROSOL SEALANT added this time. As usual for styrofoam projects, I start by cutting sheets of styrofoam into the two-dimensional shape and then gluing them together.

Next I start cutting away the major exess material and shaving it down to the final shape. There is a PVC pipe leading from the bottom of the foot well up into the body. To mount it, I pound a length of rebar into the ground at the proper location and angle and slide the PVC pipe over the rebar to hold it in place. The rebar is angled so there is pressure from the bear against the spire to keep it from twisting. A couple of big windstorms have caused it to move but it is easy to put it back in its proper position.

Almost final product in place just a few feet from Toucky. I didn't like the looks of the snout so I reshaped that since this picture was taken. He is stepping on a rock that I drilled a hole through and it helps stabilize the rebar.

I was concerned that since it didn't have a hard surface over the styrofoam that hail might cause a lot of damage to it. We've had some pretty good hail storms since this was created about four years ago, and there has been minimal damage caused by them. A little touchup painting takes care of it.