Wild Things

Whitehorse, YT

We've been camping for the last couple of days until last night at least. The Family Hotel here in Whitehorse was our resting place. Whitehorse is, again, not your imaginary frontier town. It's a busy modern small city of about 23,000 hardy souls. It's so large that it has two Starbucks! The previous night we spent in the most difficult to find campground we've been in... it was so hard to find that it's not even the one we were looking for. Where we stayed was Watson Lake Government Campground, we were looking for Big Creek Campground. The distances here are in kilometers, of course, and the maps are marked in K's but the K's on the highway did not match the K's on the map... no reason I've found. We were trying to match K's and wound up riding an extra 30 miles or so before we gave up and settled for Watson Lake. Really a very nice campground and almost empty... could be because it was 3.5 miles from the highway over a very rough gravel road and the entrance off the AK Highway was very poorly marked. It was so rough that one of Mr. Safety Pants' (Tomto) many rear view mirrors shook loose and swiveled in the wind.

Once set up and heavily dosed with 100% DEET to ward off the hungry mosquitos we immediately made friends (we thought) with a local squirrel who must have noticed our can of peanuts. We tossed him a few and he became even more friendly, eventually hopping on the picnic table and knocking the can over with his tail. He became such a bother that I had to throw a small piece of wood at him to discourage his begging.

More wildlife: At the same camp in the morning there were these black and gray birds, smaller than a crow but larger than a jay, that hung around the table. I'd opened a two-pack of granola bars and had left one in the wrapper and started packing the tent. When I returned the bar was gone and the wrapper was on the ground. Don't think it was our friend the squirrel, the bar was too big. Tomto immediately christened the bird "Great Northern Bar Thief".

We did see some larger wildlife. The previous morning just after leaving our camp at Liard River Hot Springs we encountered a herd of 50-60 Woods Bison happily grazing along the highway. We'd seen signs warning of their presence but had not seen any until then. Peaceful looking with many calves, a few lordly bulls and many cows, however we did not risk a stop to take pictures. Later we saw two solitary bulls galumphing along the road.

Saw a couple of immature elk or maybe they were young moose, also just along the road. The only close encounters, like in Ohio, were deer who dashed across traffic... no really close calls here but it was in full daylight (that's a long period of time up here).

Two families of mountain sheep were grazing on the berm of the highway, mother father and a lamb in both cases. They were a bit skittish but looked as if they might stand for a portrait if we had stopped.

Then there was the bear. In the early afternoon we sighted a big ol' brownish bear about 20 meters, eh, to the right of the road. I'm sure he (she) was a black bear but (s)he WAS grizzly brown. Tomto, He-Who-Lives-In-The -Woods-By-A-Pond, passed on this bit of bear lore: he says that mother bears just love to show off their cubs and that if we encounter a family of bears he'll let me show my love to the cubs while he waits in the wings and takes pictures. It's great to travel with such a naturalist.