Thursday, April 3, 2008

Wildlife encounters

Inspired by some delightful postings by friend Laurie Hertzel on her very cool blog, here are some wildlife encounter photos taken through the years. Laurie before a hike on the Eagle Valley wildlife trail north of Anchorage in July 1987. There was a recent moose kill site in the area that brown bears had been feeding on. We survived the hike without a bear sighting. Lazy urban bears often hung out in the garbage dumpster behind my Duluth apartment. Here I scolded a little one in September 1986. Pretty stupid. (Me, not the bear.) On a different day, I had the good sense to wait till this even larger one departed before taking out my trash. Heading out on that Anchorage trail in July 1987. The caption on the back of this photo says, "Bearly worried." In August 1987, Dad and Mom visited, and Steve and I took them out on the same dangerous trail. They, too, survived. Biking near our house in Anchorage was always an adventure. We often had to turn back because of moose on the trail. We were even more leery of moose than we were of bears, because we'd heard many tales of them chasing and hurting joggers and sometimes killing dogs with their sharp kicks. Our yard in Anchorage was up against a greenbelt. Moose went through almost daily, especially in the winter. There's a grizzly bear in this photo on the median, but you can hardly see it. The scrapblog editor doesn't like to get any closer to grizzlies than this! I took this photo in May 1987 on a hike near Toklat Lake in Denali National Park in Alaska. Saw many grizzlies, thankfully from afar, on that and other trips to Denali.

1 comment:

laurie said...

wow! so cool!
i love that you gave that bear the time of day. entirely like you!