Hey Honey - Is That A Bear?

I just came across my accounts of the year we spent travelling back before the toddler was born and a three day camping trip required precision planning and enough equipment to fill a semi-trailer. So, since I'm feeling nostalgic, I thought I'd share, in instalments, the experiences of a younger, marginally less neurotic dog.


August 29
Is it still raining? 

Well we've made it to Alaska and we’re in the capital Juneau, which is in the middle of the Alaskan rainforest surrounded by sea and huge mountains. I never realised that there were rainforests which weren't tropical, but there are more trees here than I thought there could be in the whole world, it hasn’t stopped raining since we arrived, and it is positively freezing. 

Over the last four days we have: hiked, in the pouring rain, up a mountain; visited, in the pouring rain, the ruins of the gold mining operations which were the reason the town was founded; taken, in the pouring rain, a boat trip to a spectacular marine glacier where we watched huge chunks fall into the water and become icebergs, promptly adopted as homes by the local population of very cute seals; hiked, in the pouring rain, up another mountain; taken, in the pouring rain, a tour around a salmon hatchery; and hiked, in the pouring rain, along the bottom of a mountain (getting smarter). It has all been totally stunning and beautiful, if a little damp... 

We arrived here from Seattle via the Alaska Marine Highway, which is a ferry system connecting the small islands around this part of Alaska. We spent three days on the boat, and we saw the fins and tails of several orcas, the fins and tails of a few hump-backed whales, and just the fins of some porpoises - the pictures were all predictably hopeless. We have yet to see any bears or moose, but that may be a good thing since everyone here has a bear story, and I haven't heard one yet which turned out well for the hiker. In a week's time we'll be going camping in Katmai National Park, which is where the bears gather, so keep everything crossed for us.

We're heading off in a couple of days to Anchorage, which is supposed to be a slightly more impressive city - fortunately it is also supposed to be a lot drier, which will make life easier as that's also the bit when we'll start camping.  So far we're still talking to each other, but the camping will be the test...

16 September

Hey Honey – Is That A Bear?    

                                                                              

Well, tomorrow is our last day in Alaska, and it has been one hell of a month.

After we left Juneau we did manage to escape the rain, but unfortunately we wound up in Anchorage, which was a total hole. Our perceptions may have been influenced by our unfortunate choice of accommodation - feeling guilty that we had yet to use our extremely expensive and space-consuming camping gear we had booked into a campsite in the middle of town.

Our newly established FIRST RULE of travelling is that you should never, ever, try to camp in the centre of a city, especially when the campsite is less than five meters from a spot where a major railroad crosses a

highway and right next to the runway of a small airport. To make matters worse, the place turned out to be a concrete parking site for RVs (caravans, in England) with a few sites adapted for tents by putting in sand pits somewhat smaller than even our exceptionally compact tent. The pit assigned to us appeared to have been used by the next-door campers as a convenient urinal (it was, after all, almost 50 metres to the

toilet block, a distance so great they generally felt the need to traverse it in their car). Suffice to say we lasted one, miserable night, packed up at the crack of dawn and fled before the permanent (and permanently inebriated) residents of the RV park woke up and spotted us sneaking out. 

Our experience of the city did improve from there, but not enough to compensate. Our best day there was the day we took a tour out of the city and went kayaking down on the coast, which was pretty amazing - we saw sea otters and porpoises and a huge school of beluga whales (small and white and weird-looking). A close second day was the one we left.

The good news is, once we left Anchorage we spent the most amazing week of our lives in what must be the best place in the entire world. We flew on a very, very small float plane (made, as the pilot helpfully informed us during take-off, by a company which specialises in lawnmowers) to Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park. Brooks Camp is situated on a river between two large lakes, and is the site of a huge salmon run each year, which attracts what attracted us - brown bears. I am delighted to recount that within five minutes of arrival we were seated in front of a park ranger for our "bear orientation" class, where we were told how to behave around bears, what minimum distances we must maintain and what to do if we should unexpectedly encounter a bear at less than this distance. And with all solemnity she said that the best thing we could do as we walked along the trials or if we saw a bear was in fact to clap our hands, wave our arms, and yell "HEY BEAR" for all we were worth. Seriously. These people don't joke.

The camp was arranged with a wash block and a lodge where you could warm up by a log fire at one end of a 2km trail, and a campground, comfortingly surrounded by a small electric fence, at the other end. Once we set up our tent (of course in the rain) we wandered back down the path and into the lodge. Within two minutes an enormous, powerful and totally unconcerned 300kg bear walked into the camp from the trail we had just used and started grazing next to the lodge.

From that point on we saw and heard around 50 bears a day - mothers with cubs, huge 500kg males fishing, bears wandering through camp, bears sitting on the trail between the campsite and the lodge, bears standing under the 3m high viewing platform staring up as 40 cameras stared down, and bears growling very loudly and very unnervingly and very near to the electric fence in the middle of the night. It was the most terrifying, and the most staggering and wonderful, week of my life. 

And I can unashamedly report that for six days and six nights we never ceased in our wild clapping, arm waving and hey bear-ing.

We have now moved back to civilisation and are spending our last few days in the state in Fairbanks, which is just about in the middle of Alaska. This place is famous for the Trans-Alaska pipeline, gold mining, dog mushing, and the Northern Lights. Last night we stayed up until 2am to watch the lights, having been extremely lucky and got a beautiful clear day (we were gleefully informed that this day 10 years ago saw 30cm of snow). It was an utterly amazing, if eerie, sight, and well worth the trip.  We also visited some people (and dogs) who have run in the Iditerod 1,500km dog-sled race, and were reminded of how humble our adventures have been.

I can honestly say I although we have barely scratched the surface of what there is to see and do here, I have really enjoyed our time in this state. The Alaskans are all completely nuts of course, but they are the friendliest and most interesting people you could hope to meet. And the bears were just wonderful.