There’s a mystery hanging over Chilkoot Lake, layered just under the heavy fog. It began in May and has the locals in Haines, AK baffled. It concerns a well known matriarch of the area, someone we’ve seen in the last few days sporting a Dennis Rodman hairdo, and wearing one green ear ring. OK, actually it’s an ear tag, not an earring; and, that someone isn’t a person - but a brown bear. Her name is Speedy, but of the half dozen times I’ve watched her coming and going, she moves like a sloth - slow and steady. Speedy has been fishing the inlet and stream that empties into Chilkoot Lake for 15 years. And since 2010, she’s raised her young here. She’s quite well known because she’s tolerant of humans and their cameras, their fishing gear, their cars and buses. They come to gawk at her raising her young and feeding her family. And while she has defended her cubs for years, and raised seven of them, this year she kicked three one-year olds off in June. She was photographed in May with them - one male and two females. Typically she and other brown bears will keep their cubs with them for 2-3 years. Last year food was a bit scarce, but this year there’s a bumper berry crop and the salmon (both Sockeye and Pinks) are swimming the stream onto their spawning grounds in the lake and bears have been coming in to feast. Why Speedy either kicked her cubs off or was separated from them remains a mystery. And two of the cubs have been spotted and photographed (not yet by me) gamboling around the area, fishing for eels and fish. Locals are happy to see both the cubs and mom all still alive and mystified why they aren’t together. I first heard about Speedy last year, after we visited Haines in June, 2018. This year we floated into town with high expectations of bear viewing after hearing stories about her tolerance of photographers and her plethora of cubs. And the first few days here, we saw no bears. But the temperatures had been high and with plenty of berries in the hills, speculation was that the bears would come down later this year. Sure enough, we started seeing bears and heard that Speedy and her cubs were estranged. We soon learned that the pair of young cubs were spotted up near the road where friends are camping, but we have yet to see them. (Unless they were the ones who toted a fish up into the woods and were photographed sleeping/resting side by side. When we joined the photographer at the bottom of the hill, the pair moved off further into the woods where we couldn’t see.) But my first glimpse of Speedy shocked me. She has a very strange looking mane around her face, and it’s orange! She didn’t always look this way. As for her ear tag, she’s had that for several years and she used to have a bulky necklace too - a radio collar she wore from 2008-2014. Our sightings of Speedy have included seeing her walk near the stream bank in high vegetation, and seeing her cross the road in between groups of people and scale the steep hill into the forest. I’ve seen her fishing near the bridge in the estuary and resting in high grass. But most days now, you can find her sitting on the weir grabbing salmon and pinning them against the slats as she devours choice parts. She is especially fond of the corner of the weir near the road and can sit there for over an hour fishing while we are captive. That’s because there’s a safety zone in the road that bikers and pedestrians can’t stop or move through if a bear is fishing near the weir. (You can drive through in your car, but we mostly watch on foot or bike). The weir is manned daily for certain hours as the fish counter (1 person each day) counts the Sockeye and then opens the gate so the fish can swim to spawning grounds in the Chilkoot Lake. From the estuary through the stream, past the weir and where the stream meets the lake is just over a mile, and bears can be seen fishing and foraging along the way. At the end of the road on the lake is a state park campground which is where we are camped. This allows us to walk Rocket and play with him in the lake, bike the road and look for bears and chat with the photographer friends we’ve made who come here annually to film the bears. We met most of them in Hyder (see my last blog) and saw some of them filming bears as early as 2016. When there are no bears on the river, we can watch eagles, crows, Mergansers, Great Blue Herons and up by the estuary, seals. Haines is a neat little town I wrote about last year, and the hiking is fantastic here too. One day we took off bear watching and hiked Mt Ripinski - about a 3,500 foot elevation gain. What a bonus when you summit and can view the surrounding mountains, glaciers, inlets and rivers for 360°! The trail is lined with tons of blueberry bushes, and we’re shocked we didn’t meet a bear there. We did pack out some berries and enjoyed blueberry muffins the next day. We’ve seen other bears here and love watching them fish, eat berries and move along the river. We often see Speedy’s four-year-old daughter Lulu fishing at the weir. She is a formidable bear but our friend and photographer Rick had his back to the road when she raced up the stream bank into the woods, followed by a male (boar) bear in chase who came full speed within feet of Rick in the road. Last night we watched Oreo arrive to fish at the weir when Speedy was there. These two are not related, and we prepared to film a confrontation. It’s hard to predict how bears will react when they are competing for food sources. The two were only about 20 feet apart when they met, but Speedy moved further along the weir towards her preferred fishing spot, and Oreo stayed at the opposite end. She kept looking around her and didn’t venture far into the water for about fifteen minutes. Then she began to catch fish near her feet and took them into the bushes to eat - all the while Speedy ate at the other end. We love watching bears in the wild, and especially brown bears fishing. Here at the weir and Chilkoot Lake, there are only brown bears (coastal Brown bears of the same family as Grizzlies). There are no black bears even though some of the brown bears are very dark in color. There have been some interesting stories over the past week. We’ve heard there was a huge boar up the hill near the fish counter’s cabin at the same time a sow and two cubs were up there. Apparently his presence meant the fish counter was trapped in the outhouse for an hour! The boar ran off the sow, and we’re not sure if/when she regrouped with her treed cubs. Also a sow with cubs did bluff charge a couple when they surprised each other coming out of the woods onto the road. But the mother and her cub quickly retreated into the woods. Consequently we always check our backs, look on both sides of the road towards the woods and the water, and I carry the bear spray. We’re not sure when we’ll leave here. There are other bear viewing spots we want to check out, and weather will play a factor. But we do hope, and expect to see more bears in action. Stay tuned to this bear channel for updates, photos and videos.
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I heard very distinct woofing sounds today of a mother bear sending her cub up a tree. It was loud and was a woof that seemed to keep going for minutes; although, it most likely lasted just long seconds. At the same time, the sounds of tearing bark and claws scrambling up a tree rained down on my ears. I was safe in my car and only saw the large backside as the black bear ran into the woods, and we had no idea she had a cub. We were driving deep into the woods on a gravel road in British Columbia, looking for bears. After we saw her run into the woods, Terry turned off the car and we waited to see if the bear would show itself again. Instead we heard her calls and then saw the cub scrabbling high in a fir tree. It was a thrill to see, but at the same time I was aware that our bumping down the road stressed out both mom and cub. After the scramble, it wasn’t long before mom gave the signal for baby bear to descend, and we watched him/her climb down hurriedly disappearing in the tall scrub and woodland It was an interesting day for wildlife watching as we left our RV in Hyder, AK and took a one- hour drive across the border into British Columbia to Meziadin Junction in search of bears. We’ve spent a week in Hyder near a bear viewing platform over Fish Creek where spawning Chum and Pink salmon have come to lay eggs, fertilize, and gasp their last breaths. A ritual every year for salmon after their 3-5 years in the Pacific, this year the numbers of Pink salmon are unusually high (about 30,000 were counted 8/12) while the count for Chum is down from last year by a couple thousand at 5,000. Both brown bears and black bears feast on salmon here, but the brown bears are partial to the Chum. They typically strip off the skin, and eat the brain and the roe, leaving carcasses along the bank. We have seen quite a few bears, but not in impressive numbers at the platform. Most of the 38 bears we’ve seen were from the road while driving or biking. We decided to drive to Meziadin for a change of pace as walking the platform and waiting for bears can get tiring; also it was a chance to spend time with Rocket who’s been cooped up in the RV most days. Before crossing the border we saw four Great Blue Herons, a dozen eagles, and several seals in the harbor. And at the border crossing, we saw the resident red fox hanging about. Here the customs agent meets you on the road outside a guard shack...unless bears are on the road in which case you have to wait, and the guard stays inside (there’s a blueberry patch nearby). Within a half hour of crossing the border, we saw our first black bear of the day on the road, browsing vegetation. He was big and soon crossed the road, moving into tall vegetation. We drove to a beautiful Provincial Park - Meziadin Lake - with over 50 campsites, some right on the lake. There we let Rocket taste the clear, clean water. We considered camping here at some point and were told a good way to see bears is by kayak, but we didn’t bring our inflatable boats today. The creek that feeds into Meziadin Lake is a Sockeye spawning area, and we were hoping to see bears along the creek. But the salmon weren't pooling in the creek shallows, so we went to the fish ladder 15km down the road. This was really interesting as we watched a Native who stays at the fish camp (Lax An Zok) seven weeks each Summer, pulling out salmon to eat and smoke for the folks back home; 350 families will live off this salmon for the year. He took a hand net and dipped it into the raging stream scooping up 1-4 large Sockeye, and then splashed them into a shallow pool until they can be processed. He was very adept. (My cell service is weak but soon I’ll post video links of this and bears) There’s a huge man-made falls that the salmon try to jump up river, but they instead make it upstream through a gate where 99% of the Sockeye are channeled upstream to be counted at the fish ladder. After watching fish try to jump the falls, we went to check out the ladder and met Kevin, a young college grad with an engineering degree who wanted to spend his summer in a rural area on the river counting fish. He and Terry bonded since they’re both Capitals fans and he was kind enough to explain his work here and let us know that so far this year, the Sockeye are slow to come in - just about 22,000 have swum upstream of the 90,000 anticipated which explains why we didn’t see fish nor bears in the creek or lake at Meziadin. Here on the raging river, bears don’t line up on the falls catching fish that jump into their mouths. It’s a much more subtle endeavor where they snatch them from the shallow creek, generally away from gawking tourists. Next we took the opportunity to drive dirt forest roads near the Native fish camps - bumpy, lonely, gravel roads that extend for miles. We drove one deserted gravel road for 9.3 miles taking 2 hours at about 10 mph, and we counted 266 bear scats! We thought surely we’d see a bear there, and that’s where we came across the mom and cub. On the way back to Hyder, we saw a brown bear tearing up clover and grass along the roadside near Bear Glacier. He was very large and accommodating while we photographed him as cars whizzed by. The road into Stewart, BC and Hyder is 37A - an offshoot of 37 which is known as the Stewart Cassiar Highway. It’s just one of the many scenic roads folks travel between BC, AK and the Yukon. We’ve been to Hyder now three times to see the bears, and we love it. This time we’ve watched bears on the platform, biked around quite a bit, hiked, took today’s day trip, and one day Rocket and I went to visit Salmon Glacier at the road’s end. Hyder is an odd place because it used to belong to Canada and now sits beside the Tongass National Forest in the US at the southeastern tip of Alaska, right beside British Columbia. The other odd thing to me is that when you enter Hyder from Stewart, BC there’s a Canadian Customs station for crossing the border, but no US outpost. Hyder is sandwiched between BC on both the north and south of town. Less than 20 miles north of Hyder the road crosses back into British Columbia where the road ends, and mining is underway. So there’s no US border patrol in Stewart, BC on the south nor when you reenter BC on the north side of town along the mining road. I guess there’s no US customs station because the road dead ends at Salmon Glacier in mining territory in BC, and the forest is thick, so there’s no threat of anyone illegally living where there are no services; you can’t really go anywhere from Hyder once you hit Salmon Glacier. Also leaving Hyder, the Canadian customs agents don’t work 24 hours. If you arrive after midnight, you’re instructed to pick up a telephone at the border and report your entry into BC. It’s a quirky little place with a dozen or so residents in Winter (when they get lots of snow and sometimes the mail plane can’t land for weeks), and a booming population in Summer of about several dozen people. (Note: There’s no grocery store and while the viewing platform is on BC time - same as Pacific - the post office is on AK time, one hour behind Pacific.) Like I said, it’s a quirky place. We saw a lot of bears while in Hyder, but I was hoping to see wolves, like last year. Sadly we didn’t see any, but we know they were eating salmon at a nearby creek. We saw decapitated fish with their skin and roe left behind. That’s a sign that wolves killed the salmon....they like the Pink salmon and don’t take off the skin, like bears. Wolves typically leave the fish body, and while they eat most of the head, they leave the lower jawbone. We hung out at this part of the creek on the Titan Hiking Trail several times hoping the wolves would return for more pinks, but they came when we weren’t around. On days when we thought we might not see any bears, we could count on one reliable bear - a Black bear I named Petey after the Little Rascals’ dog. Petey is blind in his right eye (we know this because it’s pinched shut). He walks slowly and comes every day to drink from a mud puddle in the quarry area where we are camped. (It’s a dispersed site about a mile from the bear viewing platform). On really hot days, we’ve watched him sprawl out in the puddle, cooling his belly the way Rocket likes to. We’ve seen him cross the gravel road after cars have zoomed by, and we’ve watched him feed on berries. Some folks have even seen him fish at the viewing platform. The way he moves and his small size make me feel sorry for him. But I’m told there was another one-eyed bear the staff named Eyeore who used to fish the creek, and he did quite well. So I hope if I come back again that I’ll learn Petey is still around. My theory is that his mother used to bring him through here, and he’s not venturing very far from where she raised him. (Perhaps he was just kicked off by mom this Summer.) He’s not bothered by people and maybe feels somewhat protected by humans. Rocket has been amazing letting me know when Petey is in the bushes on the left side of the RV or on the right side in the woods across a stone wall Petey silently crosses. Rocket goes on high alert but doesn’t make a sound. His nose does all the work, and I just read his body language. In fact while writing this blog, Petey came out after I watched Rocket’s intense stare into the bushes of 5 minutes. Then there was a rustle, and out he came. Meanwhile Terry was on a bike ride and returned just as Petey was drinking from the puddle. He heard Terry’s squeaking brakes and moved quickly into the woods. Terry proceeded to tell me of his heart pounding experience on the bike when he rode close to dense brush on the road while a bear grabbed bushes for berries feet away. He hadn’t heard nor seen the bear until he was right up on it. He quickly pedaled as fast as he could from the spot and stopped about a hundred yards away to see if the bear would walk out and cross the road. Not long after, a large black bear ambled onto the roadway and crossed. In all we’ve seen 38 bears during our week here: 32 Black and 6 Brown. Just a note here that along the coast of Alaska, the bears that eat salmon are referred to as Coastal Brown bears rather than Grizzlies. Like Kodiak bears, which are only found on Kodiak Island, these salmon eating bears are a subspecies of brown bear - technically what folks think of as Grizzlies but they are not as aggressive towards humans as Grizzlies in other areas that don’t have this abundant food source. If you come to Hyder to see bears, allow yourself plenty of time to stay on the bear viewing platform. It’s only $5.00/day or $20 for a week, and it may take hours before there’s any action. There is a lovely lagoon on one side of the platform that often has otters, beaver, kingfishers, eagles and of course salmon. In the creek on the other side of the platform you can watch the life (and obvious signs of death) cycle of spawning salmon as they vie for mates, lay and fertilize eggs and then die when their work is done. Mew gulls and eagles along with the bears also grab your attention as they take part in the struggle. But bring a raincoat, a camera and some binoculars. And if you can stay for a few days, you’re guaranteed some interesting conversations. We’ve met lots of people from all over the world with varied occupations, including dedicated nature photographers (some who’ve tried to help me diagnose my camera’s focus problems). And if you want to know what happened on our other trips here, I blogged about Hyder last year 8/15 titled A TALE OF TWO and also our first trip 7/31/2016 titled AT THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN - both different experiences in the same place.
“Into each life, a little rain must fall.” This is something I remember from childhood - I remember my mom saying it; and, it resonates with me even today. When we left VA in late June heading west, this saying popped into my head every day. There was literal rain and quite a bit of it - I recall nightly in Glacier National Park. There was even a fierce hailstorm as we approached a campground in the forest one afternoon. But there was also metaphoric rain as well - rain that fell in the shape of challenges to our decisions. Were we meant to keep traveling? Should we be settling down and finding a new home? Would the RV be our home for another year? Could Terry’s knee bounce back after surgery so he could hike and bike the way he hoped? Was I right to start a film project in April that had a challenging fundraising deadline looming in August? All of these questions splattered down on the highways of South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Oregon. And amidst them were thunderous events like having my bike stolen, waiting for five days in a parking lot for new brakes and a sway bar bracket on the RV. And then the ultimate event in Coburg, OR where a team of service technicians secured the floor of the RV to the separating wall on the passenger side of the coach...a very costly event that the manufacturer has refused to pay for even though it’s happened now three times!!! Well in spite of the metaphoric rain, the water from the clouds has been noticeably absent lately. Oregon has been beautifully sunny and warm with Carolina blue skies, lush green evergreens, and abundant stars visible on nice cool nights. We’ve managed to meet these challenges and overcome them. We weathered the days of repairs and the mounting bills, Terry’s knee got a much needed rest and after some light hikes and some flat bike rides, he’s trusting it more. After wrangling with insurance policies, carnets to get film gear through customs, challenges of shipping 10 bags of film gear when airlines limit you to 4, and falling short of our fundraising goal, I came to peace with the fact that the crew is in Austria and I’m in the US while we take advantage of credit cards for funding it all. And Terry and I decided that this rain is needed and not a violent storm after all. Everyone has challenges in life, and many people have more to deal with than we. While sitting in a waiting room in Coburg for our major RV fix, we met a couple who lost everything in the fire that destroyed Paradise, CA last November. They and others from their town are trying to walk through life after running a gauntlet of smoke, embers, sparks and shear terror surrounding them on the road out of their community. My dilemma of choices, travels and next steps seems ludicrous compared to their choices for rebuilding their lives. I pray for them that the rain that falls brings new life, rainbows, life giving water and puts out the fires smoldering nearby. As for us, we believe that just like Wordsworth’s poem behind the clouds, the sun is shining. So we’re aiming the RV into it as it sets in SE Alaska and British Columbia. That’s right, our trip continues and we’re off to look for the spirit bear - the black bear that’s actually white. There are only about 300 in the wild, and they follow the salmon run in the Great Spirit Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. It will take some time to get there and we’ll try to time it when the salmon are plentiful. So we may visit some favorite haunts in southeast AK like Hyder and Haines where bears and other animals also follow salmon runs. I’m sure some more rain will fall, (like buckets in the rainforest) like it does in every life. And isn’t it great - because it replenishes our aquifers, quenches our thirst, feeds the plants and well, just sustains life! But this time when it comes, I think we’ll put out rain barrels and catch it as we contemplate which rain gear to use. For more about where we’re headed (specifically Bella Coola in the forest) check here: https://greatbearrainforest.gov.bc.ca.
It’s been over a month since I blogged and now that the trajectory is set for the summer and the film shoot logistics are finalized (crew is in Austria now), I’ll try to blog more frequently. I had a couple of nice ones in my head - one about hiking solo in the Badlands, and in Glacier watching bears, and one about Crater Lake’s stunning scenery and camping at Diamond Lake. We reconnected with some friends along the way too - Lisa & Gary Richter, and I visited with the Whitcombs in MT - worthy of blogs as well. Maybe I can resurrect the memories and do them justice - posting in the near future. But I’ve included some noteworthy photos from the last month here. And by the way, if you want to know more about the film project, check out our website including 2 new pages: “Notes From the Field” and “Sugar Baby Crew Profiles” https://www.greenboxfilm.com. Happy trails wherever your roads lead this Summer.
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AuthorFormer documentary film producer, wife and mother of one...I'm taking time off to see the US with my husband Terry. Here's where I'll write about our adventures RVing until the money runs out! Archives
August 2021
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