Saturday, August 23, 2008

No Bears are out tonight, cause daddy shot them all last night?

Here in Juneau there are a couple of things that are regular....the rain, the XtraTuffs (I need a pair), Wxcl days, eagles, and bears. Well my friend Annie left this week and before she left we decided we needed to go bear watching a few times. We went one night and Annie, Whit and Steve left me alone in the darkness of the Mendenhall Glacier Moraine Ecology Trail (that's a mouthful). I was walking along the railing, cause that's what I do, alone. I was mainly concerned with not falling into the river or off the rail down the 12 feet to the ground, and also not getting eaten alive by all of the stupid mosquitos that are up here. Well, I was intensely concentrating because I was walking through the underbrush of a tree next to me. Well, up in the tree not ten feet from my head was a black bear watching and ready to pounce at me. For some reason I was tuned into this just in the nic of time and I was able to jump out of the way of this charging bear. AWESOME. Well, the other three heard my yell of triumph and came running. By the time they arrived on the scene the bear had already sulked off into the woods and was now MIA. Do any of them actually believe it happened? No, they all think I'm lying. And, I am. It would have been so sweet if that is how it happened. But, it didn't....this is the true story.

Whit, Annie, and I were at the glacier bear watching the night after that story happened (the bear never attacked me and that is the only fabrication...they really did leave me and I really did see a bear and by the time they came to see him he had already gone back into the darkness). It was still light outside and there were tourists everywhere getting excited about the bears, the salmon are spawning and are totally awesome and everywhere and so are the bears. Well, we were watching this little guy debate about jumping into the lake when a bigger bear came and chased the little tike away. They were running around the hill. Well, we decided we wanted to see the chase up close. We started to predict where the hunt was going down.....We were walking on the trail when out jumped the little guy (He was the size of a large man on all fours). Annie about piddled in her panties, whit didn't seem to care much at all and I was super stoked to try and touch him. Well, he came up to within a foot of me. I was so tempted to reach out and pet him-but then I would turn into one of the tourists that we all make fun of so frequently. I stopped with pictures of me standing next to him. The whole time we were waiting for the big guy to come charging out-thankfully he never did. I'm not so sure I would have walked away with dry panties if he had. It was the perfect ending for our adventures with Annie. One crazy girl meets up with two crazy girls=a lot of fun and trouble.----These pictures were not zoomed in at all. The bear was only an arms length away!