Yellowstone National Park (08-17-17)

We were lucky enough to get a spot in Yellowstone, with some help from our friends Liz and Randy.

Randy is a park Ranger, and Liz volunteers in several capacities.

The last time we were here, we were in a crowded RV park with electric, water, sewer hook up, and hundreds of other RVers. This time we were in a very small, out of the way campground, and THIS was the view out our window.  We fell in love immediately!

While we are here we will have only the water in our tank, no sewer hook up, and we aren’t allowed to use a generator, so the only power we have is what we can generate with our two solar panels.

We arrived on the weekend, so Randy and Liz were able to go hiking with us and hang out for a couple of days.

Our hike to Trout Lake was an adventure.  The lake was beautiful and we hiked past it and came across two other lakes- a Trifecta!















On the way back, we looked behind us and discovered a bison had moved onto the trail, and down to the lake for a drink of water.















Getting around the park to explore can be a challenge.  There are numerous traffic jams.














One day we were up on a hill, looking for some wildlife in the river when we noticed a bison causing a traffic issue.










Soon we saw him start across the bridge.
With the amount of bison scat on the hill we were on, we were concerned that he was headed in our direction, and in any case, once he crossed the bridge, he would be between us and the truck. 



So we booked it, and made it back to the truck just in time to see him lumber up the hill we had been on!

Of course, looking for wildlife is one of the most fun things to do in Yellowstone. We had heard that there was a pack of wolves feeding on a bison-  see the wolves? No? Me either.  This kill was so far away, we couldn’t really see anything.  But…. the next day, there was a bison kill closer to the road.

I would have loved it if we were the only ones who knew about this kill but the traffic jam was intense.  People don’t even bother to pull all the way off the road!

We gave up that first day, but got up at 5 am the next morning and headed out, hoping we would be able to find a place to park our beast.

Although we weren’t the first to arrive, we did find a spot.  It was too dark to see, but we heard that there was a grizzly at the kill site.  

Once the sun came up, the bear was gone and a wolf arrived.  Even though it was pretty close, “close” is a relative term and it was hard to get a good picture.

We were rather disappointed that we never saw any bears in Yellowstone.  Liz said its a little too warm for them and they went to higher elevations. We did see lots of other animals though…

We took a nice ride down a dirt road, looking for bears.  We didn’t see any, but this beautiful fox trotted down the road, seemingly oblivious to the 5 cars following him.

We also saw several Osprey- some were in a nest and some were soaring in the sky…

There were a few elk in the park and a few we saw up north, in Gardiner, when we went exploring..

And of course there were many, many bison.

This is getting too long so……To Be Continued…..

The Bare Bear Facts (08-31-14)

So, Hyder Alaska is all about the bears and yes, we did see two bears. 



This is how it works.  The U.S. Forestry has a boardwalk set up along a creek that is frequented by bears- both brown and black bears.  Everyone is very quiet while they stand around waiting, so the bears won’t get scared away.  







Paul and I donned our full rain gear, since of course it was raining, and stood there on the boardwalk for about an hour or so.

We talked to the rangers and to other “watchers”. Some people had elaborate plastic bag set ups to keep their cameras dry.  We had an umbrella. Finally, we saw a black bear, across the street, eating berries in the bushes.  Nice, but not what we came for.

We were thinking of leaving but the ranger told us it was just getting to be the time of night when the bears will show, so we waited.  Soon enough an enormous brown bear came waddling down the creek.

Just look at the size of the belly on this guy.  He is an older bear, so not as skittish with the large audience he had while he ate his dinner. The ranger says older bears are not as much fun to watch because they are so experienced at fishing that they just stomp on a fish and eat it, whereas the younger bears haven’t figured that out, and they chase the fish. 

This guy just ambled down through the middle of the creek, picking up salmon as he went.  You can see all the dead and dying salmon all over the stream.  It’s late in the season and many salmon have spawned and died so the bears have been feasting and are pretty full,  allowing them to be fussier about what they eat.

It was extremely difficult to get decent pictures because it was getting dark, and still raining pretty heavily.  You can see that this guy’s fur is soaked.

So that was our bear experience at Hyder.  We felt lucky because many people hang around all day and never get to see a bear.

Our luck got even better the next day- after we left Hyder.  We were continuing our trip down the Cassier Highway when Paul said that the guy we had just passed had made a motion towards the nearby bridge, as if to say there was something to look at.

It’s pretty common for people to share information that way, so we stopped to look. 

There were two brown bears fishing in the creek!  They were both pretty young, not huge.

 


 

This guy climbed up some debris in the middle of the stream, to take a break from fishing.  There weren’t as many dead fish in this area, so these bears were working a little bit to get their lunch.

  

We watched them for about 10 minutes before they went around a corner and out of sight.













This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip- to have the chance to watch  the bears just going about their business.

One of the things we noticed in Alaska, is that sometimes the bears would be called Brown Bears and sometimes they would be called Grizzly Bears.  Of course we asked about the difference between Grizzly and Brown and we found out that although they are technically the same species- there are differences.

A Grizzly bear lives inland and lives on berries, plant roots, and small animals such as ground squirrels.  A Brown Bear is a Grizzly Bear that lives on the coast and feasts on mostly salmon and berries. Brown Bears grow bigger because they have a more plentiful food source. 

  The shoulder hump is actually a muscle, and it’s usually bigger on a Grizzly- they use the muscle more to dig out their food than Brown Bears do.

Black Bears don’t have a hump on their shoulder at  all. That’s one of the differences between black bears and grizzlies. Which brings up the question- what are the other differences between a Black Bear and a Grizzly Bear?  When you’re hiking in bear country, it’s really good to know which bear you encounter because how  you should react depends on the type of bear it is.







The color of their fur means nothing.  A Black Bear can be anywhere from black to cinnamon in color. 










A Black Bear’s ears are wider apart and actually bigger than a Grizzly’s. Grizzly ears are also more rounded and not as pointy.

The shape of their snout is different.  A grizzly snout is curved and a black bear snout is straight, from ears to nose.

Their paws are shaped differently, and a Grizzly's claws are bigger (not that I plan on getting close enough to distinguish the difference!).

It would come in handy on the trail to know who has been on the trail before you. This was in Yellowstone, obviously an old print, but fun to find.

  Black Bears and Grizzly Bears also have somewhat different habitats.  Black Bears are found more in the woods and trees and Grizzlies prefer the open fields.

When we’re  hiking in bear country, we’re always alert for signs of bears on the trail.  One of the ways to avoid a bear encounter is to make noise while you are hiking.  I tend to sing, or call out “ here, kitty kitty” just to be goofy.  It doesn’t matter what you say, just that you make noise.  Some people wear bells on their backpack, so their noise is made without them having to talk.  One of the signs of bears that we might come across is bear scat (poop), and the scat is another difference between the two types of bears- Grizzly Bear scat has bells in it. 

I’ve heard that joke about a hundred times, but it does point out one of the major differences between blacks and grizzlies-  attitude.

Black Bears tend to be more afraid of people and will be less likely to attack (unless there are cubs involved!)  Grizzlies are more aggressive.

These Black Bears were on the hiking trail in Yosemite.  The mama bear was well aware of the many hikers and was fine with sharing the trail as long as no one got too close.

That’s probably more than anyone wanted to know about bears, but I really enjoy seeing the animals in their own habitat so I got carried away- plus, it’s raining again and I am bored.
We have been moving pretty quickly through British Columbia, headed towards the border.

The Haul Road (08-14-14)

  The Dalton Highway may be more commonly remembered as the “Haul Road”. It follows the Alaskan pipeline all the way up to Prudhoe Bay.

In it’s heyday, 2.1 million barrels of oil a day flowed through the pipeline. Right now it runs about a half a million barrels a day.

The road was built in the 1970s to service the pipeline and it’s crews, and in fact, it didn't open to the public until the 1990s.

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Its 450 miles of dirty, dusty, muddy sometimes gravel, sometimes dirt, and sometimes paved road, traveled very heavily by truckers. In fact, it was made clear to us several times that the truckers have the right of way and we should stay clear of them.  These guys fly down the road at the speed of light, so we were happy to pull over and let them do their thing.





There are very narrow areas and very steep areas, and sometimes very narrow steep areas.  This one is called the Ice Cut and its one of the more dangerous hills.

This section is appropriately named the roller coaster. There wasn’t always a spot to pull over and take a picture, and this is one road you don’t want to stop on.  As it is, they say to keep checking in your rear-view mirror- one minute there could be no one there, and the next, a huge truck could be breathing down your neck.  It happened to us several times.  We got passed by a truck we didn’t even know was there.

 
  When it rains, the road turns into a slippery, mushy, muddy mess in some places. There were a few places where I was holding my breath, although Paul never lost control of the truck.

Along the road we saw a bunch of stuff, and learned a bunch of stuff.  This bar is called a headache bar.  It’s designed to stop any vehicle that is big enough and tall enough to damage the pipe. There are a lot of these along the way.

Part of the pipe is buried under the ground and part of it is above ground.  Sometimes it dips under the road itself.

Some sections are raised and some are put underground to allow large animals room to get past the pipeline.

There are several types of large animals that roam this area.  Musk Ox are pretty common in the northern sections.

We saw several herds of Musk Oxen and I had never even heard of them until we got to Alaska.

 

   This guy was a riot.  He was trotting down the road in front of us ..







…and he kept stopping to look and see if we were still following him.

Finally he turned  and took off into the tundra.  We saw a fair amount of hunters while we were driving down the road. Mostly they were after the caribou so lucky for this guy, his rack isn’t big enough.

In areas where there is permafrost, the pipe has radiators that move the heat generated by the oil from the ground up to the air.  Once permafrost starts to melt, the pipeline would sink.

There are just a couple of small towns situated along the pipeline- and by small, I mean populations of 15-25. Other than that, its pretty much the only road for hundreds of miles.


Coldfoot is the only place to get diesel  along the 450 mile road, until you reach the end.  Its conveniently located at about the halfway point. The story about the name is that the first miners in the area had intended to stay here through the winter, but they got “cold feet” and left, so it was referred to as the “Coldfoot guys’ place”. There is no cell service except at the beginning and end of the road, so we used their phone to make a call.  In order to actually get to the Arctic Ocean, you have to call and make a reservation 24 hours in advance and give your driver’s license number, so we needed to get that taken care of.



Coldfoot has a small “hotel”, a restaurant with pretty good food, and a bar.  There are no signs.  I guess when you are the only bar and restaurant for 240 miles, you don’t need to put a sign out front.












There are plenty of places to pull off and spend the night.  This was one of my favorites.









The road starts out in a spruce forest, loosely following a couple of rivers along the way. 

The salmon actually travel 1100 miles to spawn in these gorgeous rivers.

Sometimes the views got monotonous, but before we got a chance to get too bored (I am not sure Paul ever got bored, between watching for trucks, ruts and potholes) the scenery would change.

We got closer and closer to the mountains- the Brooks range.

Before we knew it we were going up and over them through Atigan Pass, one of the more scenic areas along the road and the highest pass in Alaska.

Soon after we came down out of the mountains, the terrain changed again.  Gone were the spruce trees- we had already passed the “furthest north spruce tree” a few miles back.

The colors are vibrant- miles and miles of yellows, oranges and reds.
The Arctic tundra is what grows when the ground underneath is permanently frozen-permafrost.

This area falls within the Arctic Circle- we passed a signpost for it quite a while back.  The Arctic Circle is an imaginary boundary line set at about 66 degrees …..anywhere north of the Arctic Circle the sun does not set on June 21, and it doesn't rise on December 21.  When you get as far north as the North Pole, the sun doesn't set for 180 days in a row.

After several days of driving and exploring, we reached the end of the road...

Random Thought: When I commented at the grocery store in Fairbanks that the outside of the bread bags seemed wet, an employee responded that except for a few types of bread from a local bakery, ALL the bread products coming to the interior/Fairbanks, are frozen because of the long trip.