Western Kenai Peninsula-Part 2 (08-03-14)

  We wandered around Homer enjoying the good weather while trying to decide what we wanted to do.








The views of Kachemak Bay were gorgeous with the mountains in the background.  Many people take a water taxi across the bay to hike to the nearby glacier, and many more people fly across the bay to go watch the grizzly bears.





The company we would have wanted to fly with was booked solid- one of the downsides to not planning in advance is that we sometimes miss out- so we decided not to look for bears. 

Once that decision was made, we decided it was time to leave Homer and we headed back up the coast towards Anchorage. We stopped along the way to do several hikes- the first one was a 6 mile hike to Skilak Lake. Nothing spectacular, but pretty views, anyway.

Our second hike was to the Russian River.  We had heard that bears frequent the area but the only bears we saw were along the road. Many salmon swim up this river to spawn.

 

They all congregate after having made it up the river this far.  They still have to leap over all the waterfalls in order to get to where they can lay their eggs. Look carefully and you can see two salmon making the leap over the falls in this picture.

With this picture I cheated and took a still from a movie I took, but you can clearly see the salmon jumping over the falls.






Our last adventure on the Kenai Peninsula was a visit to the Alaskan Wildlife Conservation Center.

The AWCC takes in animals that can not survive in the wild.  We saw quite a few moose, several Lynxes, and, of all things, some Musk Ox. I’ve never seen one of these, to my knowledge, but they sure were interesting looking. 

My favorite was the grizzly enclosure. It was so hot for the bears that they were mostly sitting in the water when we saw them.  One just plopped himself down in a puddle.

He rolled around in the water until he was soaked.

There are 3 grizzlies in here, and they each have a story.  Two of the bears came here as cubs.  One day a man saw that a grizzly had killed a moose in his back yard.  Being worried that the bear would kill his dog, the man killed the grizzly- which is perfectly legal up here.  What he didn’t realize at the time was that it was a sow, who had two small cubs sitting up in the trees.  Two of the bears here are those two cubs.

One of the other grizzlies was hanging out in the bigger pond, gnawing on the bone of some animal.

We watched him for quite a while.  He worked hard, using his claws to get to the marrow in the bone.

Eventually he had had enough of the water and the bone, and he meandered off- and when he did, so did we.

On our way out we passed by the black bear enclosure, where the bears were being fed salmon.  We listened to a short presentation by the ranger about black bears.  While we were there, someone dropped their iphone into the bear enclosure and the rangers were discussing how to get it out. They were hoping to get it without going into the enclosure, although if they had to go in, they could, when the bears were elsewhere.  Mostly they were worried about the bear trying to eat the phone.