Alaska natural 2

A close encounter of the bear kind

Not the same bear. This one ran 

through our yard in Valdez then 

hid behind a tree in a yard across

the street.

 After a black bear and her cubs interrupted a foot race in Anchorage recently, an Alaska-themed 
facebook page asked followers to offer their stories of bear encounters. While considering that I realized I had never put an account of my closest grizzly encounter here, so rather than lose it among many and perhaps more exciting stories, I’m putting mine here instead.

It happened this way: If you’ve read this blog before you probably know the cabin at the East Pole stands high on a hillside. In the days when I smoked, rather than have the place smell like a smoker live there, my favorite place to smoke was leaning out an open window with a view downhill and all the way to Denali. Doing that a day after I’d hiked in one August, I heard a loud crack of wood below me and somewhat off to the west. As I watched, a full grown grizzly broke out of the brush at the bottom of the hill. Behind her came one, and then another and then a third cub followed. These were second-year cubs almost fully grown but just enough smaller than the mother to identify them as yearlings.

As they progressed across the bottom of the hill the sow approached the beaten down weeds I had trampled on my way up to the cabin the day before. I figured she would catch my scent and want nothing to do with a human and head on to the east. Instead, she halted, snuffled a little, lifted her head to look around and then put her nose down and turn to follow my trail. I watched her slowly progress toward the turn that led uphill and when she reached it she started up the hill with the cubs hot on her heels. As the situation developed, it proved fascinating for a time until I realized she would follow that trail right to the cabin and maybe I should get ahead of this situation before it turned serious. With a warning flashing in my head of a friend’s comment one time:  “I like to make it uncomfortable for bears to be around me,” I crossed the cabin considering the options. I decided to grab the large-bore rifle I carry for bears, but also a handful of bottle rockets and a lighter.

Then I stepped out onto the porch. I did that just in time to see her back as she turned the corner in tall grass that led straight to the cabin, her nose still down on the trail. At this point she only had about 50 feet to where I stood and coming fast.

Not letting go of the rifle, I fumbled a bottle rocket out of the pack and holding it in the hand and arm that also cradled the rifle, I flicked the lighter and it the fuse. I held it long enough for sparks to begin coming out of the cracker with enough force to fly off and let it go. It landed in front of her just before it went off.

What happened next left a lasting impression. First I heard a roar, then she stood up on her hind legs, her head swinging from sided to side trying to locate the source of what to her probably had changed from food to danger. Now, any grizzly or brown bear I had ever been close to was stuffed an on display. In those poses, the fur is always matted down and the bear looks skinny. Let me tell you a full-grown, live bear only 20 feet from you with its fur puffed out is a whole lot more formidable-looking than that bear in the airport. Still I kept my head and managed to light off another bottle rocket. This one hit her high in the chest between her forelegs when it went out. With that she let out another roar and did something of a bear pirouette, dropped down onto the first cub in line where it squealed loudly. All three took off running back down the hill.

I watched them disappear into thick brush, but as I listened, the sounds of their escape stopped way too soon. They had gone out of sight, then apparently stopped still trying to figure out what she was running from. I’m not sure she ever saw me standing on the porch above her.

After that experience I found a use for this gift from my 
            kids. Motion detector Billy Bass ought to frighten any 
            bear off the porch. "Take me to the river …"

With my friend’s advice still loud in my head, I tried to make their visit more uncomfortable yet and fired another rocket in the general direction they had run. I heard another roar and then what sounded like four bulldozers hurriedly pushing through the brush in a generally northwest direction. This time their noise slowly fell off as they made their way farther from the cabin and I started to breathe a little easier. In time I couldn’t hear them anymore and figured that was the last I would see of them, at least that day. I took some bear cautions like putting some pots and pans on the porch that would make noise if they came up onto it.

About half an hour later, I was moving around outside (my rifle close at hand) and I heard three distinct gunshots quite a distance away in the direction the bears had headed. At that point I found myself hoping someone hadn’t shot them — that those were just “bottle-rocket” warning shots.

At that point I took a little measure of congratulations to self; we had met with no damage to anyone and we all lived and maybe even the bears had learned a lesson in avoiding humans. When I hiked out a couple of days later I watched the trail carefully where I guessed those shots had been fired but saw no signs of a violent meeting anywhere.

Black bears interrupt Mayor's Marathon

Lost hiker found after bear encounter

2019

The Arctic is on fire

     When I first saw that headline it took a moment to fully recognize its significance. Imagine it. We grow up thinking of the Arctic as a severely cold environment, much of it covered by ice and underlain by permafrost where few people have the fortitude to survive. Polar bears and ice and not much more where the temperature rarely rises above 40 F and can dip to minus 50 or more. and you could walk from Alaska to Siberia on the ice in the Bering Strait. Tough to imagine it could be on fire, but it is, almost all the way around the world at least in the sub-Arctic regions.
ALASKA

Alaska in July when we were just getting going. By Aug. 25 more than 750 fires covering 2.6 million acres had been reported. (NASA photo)

SIBERIA

EUROPE

     So what?
     Well, here's what. while we've been looking north we discover all the lands along the Equator, all the way around the world are on fire and it looks a lot worse from here.
     First there's the Amazon
SOUTH AMERICA

Impressive, huh? Those are the lungs of the wold burning today.

     But there is more. And then just when we have that absorbed that we learn there are more fires in Equatorial Africa than in South America.

AFRICA

Seldom mentioned as such, but this has to be a huge oxygen generator as well.

     If there were a large land mass out in the Pacific Ocean it would probably be on fire as well.
     Those fires in the Amazon and Africa may be the most dangerous. In Alaska we have serious fire-fighting ability. You have to wonder what's available in Amazon and African jungles. Both look so massive as to seem impossible to extinguish. And, they are consuming large numbers of trees in areas that produce a large portion of the available oxygen for the planet.
     Does anyone think climate change is junk science now? You have to wonder if by the end of the year if the fires continue we will have passed the tipping point, where Earth heats up to the point no mitigating measures can reverse the effect, those resources that regenerate naturally have been exhausted and eventually our planet becomes uninhabitable much sooner than the most radical of those fake scientists predicted.
     Aren't we lucky Antarctica doesn't have trees? Oh, wait. There's melting.

At least 2.6 million acres have burned in Alaska this summer
The Amazon can't be recovered once it's gone
More fires burning in Africa than in South America
More than 1,600 fires reported in Europe this year.

Siberia: World largest forest has been burning for months

2018
On being a good moose neighbor
January 3, 2018

Today promised to be a good one. I was up at the break of dawn (10 a.m.) these days. My plan was a little putzing and cleanup around  the house and then some fun with the snowmachine. Yesterday I had finally got the last of my stuff and the machine up the hill to the cabin and I was looking forward to driving around grooming my trail and blasting all the way up to where I can make a turn around right next to the porch.
     I went to the picture window to see if the mountain was out. It wasn't, but there was a moose browsing through a thicket at the bottom of the hill right next to my trail.
     Now that put a kink in my plan. Sure, I could make some noise and chase it out of there, but that's poor form when you live with wildlife. Moose are stressed in winter, food is in short supply and their energy gets down and they don't need any extra stress. Best to leave her alone. I am in no hurry. I took a few pictures and started some indoor projects, all the time watching her while she took her sweet time. Two hours later she hadn't moved 20 feet. An hour after that I took another look and watched as she calmly laid down. Interesting, she laid there for some time her head up her ears alert, as if making sure it was safe to sleep. Then while I was beginning to lose daylight for my snowmachine sojurn she seemd to sigh and then stretched her neck out, put her her chin down on the snow and most obviosuly went to sleep. How rude.
     Counting the time she spent alert listening for danger, she laid there for almost three hours.
Toward 3 in the afternoon I looked down to check on her and I heard a sound in the woods off to the west. It sounded like a human talking in a normal voice, too far away to hear what was being said.
     Only a couple of minutes later at least four and maybe as many as six moose burst out of the forest from that direction heading right for my sleeping friend. She sprang up in a heart beat. What I saw as I wrestled with my camera to get it to focus on the moose instead of some damned twig somewhere betweeen us (later I remembered how to go to manual focus) was a big bull a couple of smaller moose, probably mature cows and a couple of yearlng calves. One of them was bawling while it ran past. I assummed it was one of the calves, maybe hurt. They moved through pretty fast, though the bull stopped for a moment to check out the moose that had been there all day.
     Then they all moved off, the group northeast toward the river and my cow somewhere up the hill to the southeast.

That was when the snow started falling. That took the last of the potential fun out of the snowmachine riding for me and I went back indoors for a good long nap. Tomorrow is another day.


2010

Rain? Really?

November 23, 2010

Some days just aren’t fair. I mean, you live in Alaska and you can expect certain things from the weather. Mostly it won’t get too hot in the summer. It will rain on and off from mid July until September and in winter it is cold and there’s snow. Given.

Today we had icy rain. All the way from the south coast to the Arctic coast. Roads so icy they were barely passable. The first 10 miles of the commute were ice shoulder to shoulder on the road and no treatment whatsoever, not even a little gravel spread on the curves or hills. It was 20 mph the whole way. I followed a school bus with chains and they chewed up a little track that I kept one wheel in, The highway was a little better but never got over 45. Schools closed around me and should have been closed in Anchorage.

Fairbanks was just about immobilized and even Barrow the northernmost city in North America got icy rain. A meteorologist in Fairbanks said something like this only happened twice in the last 100 years.

Coming home was worse. An hour and a half to do a trip that normally takes about 40 minutes.Worst again was the blue highway to the house. Ten miles of sheet ice and no school bus. I stopped once I got on it to clean the headlights but even pulled off the road it was so slick I could barely stand up. Thought better of it and drove on with dirty headlights. On the way out this afternoon I passed some folks who were going the other way. A truck was hooked up to a small car and it looked like the car couldn’t make an icy hill and the truck was going to pull it up. I remembered that on the way home and got a little way on at the two hills I have to climb. First one went fine, but the second one was longer. 

I love the seven gears the paddle shifters offer for the control they afford, but even so I barely made it. There’s a good straight stretch before it but every time I got up to about fifth gear, the wheels started slipping and climbing toward the ditch. Barely made it to the top as I held onto each gear as long as I could, knowing each lower gear added that much more torque to make the wheels spin. Even so I topped it in second gear, barely, and then still slipped and slid the next five miles before I got off on a side road. Snow I can deal with but rain? Really? What’s fair about that? Supposed to be same tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.