20050727  Stewart BC  51/61  Cloudy, rain, cold, miserable.                         Picture Link

Up in the morning to light rain and cool. Got onto the road southward toward Stewart BC.

The rain made the gravel sections of the highway very damp with puddles. From Km295 to Km245 there was a 50 Km/30 mile gravel section with grading and other roadwork in process despite the rain.

The rig looks even more like something out of the ooze. We stopped at the Bell II Lodge to wash the truck's side windows - we couldn't see out of them nor see anything in the mirrors. Raining.

We continued to Meziadin Junction and fueled up there ($0.979CDN/liter, $3.30US/gal). Rain stopped.

Then we did the last 40 miles into Stewart. Raining.

We checked in at the Bear River RV Park, and said hi to Bob, the manager. He put us in a nice site close to the office, as requested. We set up the trailer and headed for Hyder, AK, and the bear viewing point run by the Forest Service.

No bear. We waited for an hour and none showed up. We watched the salmon fighting their way up-creek (this is Fish Creek).

So we went to eat a late lunch/early dinner at a place recommended to us called the White Bus. The cookhouse is an old school bus painted white, and a few other colors. There is a shed in back with tables and several covered tables in front. We sat at one end of a big wooden picnic table and a German family sat at the other. We had halibut and chips - very good.

Back to the viewing point. As we walked to the end of the viewing walk (wood walkway about 10 feet above ground with sturdy railings and gates at each end), we saw a brown (grizzly) bear. The ranger said she was a young bear because she hadn't perfected her fishing skills. So she wandered around and ate scraps of salmon that other bears had left.

That bear wandered away downstream. Several minutes later another brown bear came from the upstream side down toward us. The ranger said this one also appeared to be a youngish female. She missed a fish, then got one and took it to streamside across from us. She ate most of it, then wandered down and up the creek trying to get another fish but missing. Finally, she got another one right in front of us. She took that into the brush on the other side to eat it, but came back out very soon. Later, a ranger said young bears sometimes kill the fish, then find it's a male and discard it to go get a female fish. That bear also wandered off downstream.

Another one appeared on the scene from downstream. Ranger guessed at it being a 5-6 yr old female. That one caught a fish and took it away to eat it. About then, the heavens opened and the rains came seriously.

We decided not to get thoroughly soaked and returned to the truck. Then we decided to return to the little house and hide from the wet.

After we cleared Canadian Border Security (their Immigration and Customs departments merged recently) and were traveling slowly along the water toward Stewart, we spotted a black bear right next to the roadway on the other side of the jersey barrier. We jumped on the brakes and the bear jumped to grab the adjacent telephone pole. By the time we backed up to him, he had disappeared. So we went to the grocery for bananas and then to the little house.

There, we processed the bear pictures and a few others we'd taken. Now we'll take it easy and go to sleep with the rain on the roof sound.

20050728  Stewart BC 53/64   Cloudy, cool, intermittent rain.                        Picture Link

We got up and went to watch bears. A male 4-5 yrs old brown (grizzly) bear was working up and down the creek, catching and eating salmon. We watched him go after salmon, missing most, but getting enough. He finally wandered away, so we went off to eat.

We hopped into the truck, backed out, turned and started down the road. All of a sudden, there was a black bear in front of us on the road, walking away from us. We stopped and turned off the engine to watch the bear. A ranger joined us and mentioned that if the black bear went down to the river where the brown bear might still be, the black bear would likely be right back out. As it happened, the black bear turned away from the creek and the other bear and went back into the woods. After a little time, we continued on our way.

We had breakfast at Wildflour, our favorite breakfast/bakery in the area. They were busy, but we got what we wanted in time enough. It was very good and more than sufficient.

Then we returned to the bear viewing place. No bears. We hung around for a while, knowing that this is not a good time (11:00am) for finding bears out and running around. We chatted with people we've kept bumping into on the road previously and here, Gene and Dee Smith from Littleton CO. We took pictures of scenery, found an eagle's nest in a tree, and chatted until a ranger mentioned that the clouds might be lifting high enough to go up to the glacier and see something.

We hopped in our truck and the Smiths hopped in theirs and we went off independently toward Salmon Glacier viewpoints. We did fine, the road having been worked on for the first time in two years just two weeks ago. We ran into the cloud layer just below or at the good glacier viewpoint. Sometimes the cloud would be above us, sometimes below. I took pictures of the glacier and then Dolores went off uphill, found a mess of flowers in a mini-Alpine-meadow and took their pictures, and pictures of the meadow. Very pretty.

She bought a CD from a vendor at the viewpoint, alledgedly of bears and glaciers. We haven't had the chance to look at it.

The vendor said the road beyond that point (where there used to be a sign reading "Road Not Maintained Beyond This Point") had been worked on and was in good shape for the next seven km. So we continued out the road, winding along the edge of the mountains for the most part.

Eventually, we got to a large basin and wandered down into it. We found there the remains of an old stamp mill that we discovered later to be the Granduc Mill. At one time, a tunnel was bored 11 miles from Granduc to the mines in the Leduc area west of there. Ore was transported through the tunnel to the Granduc concentrator and its output trucked down to Stewart for transport out to a refinery. Both gold and copper were processed at Granduc.

We took pictures of the mill site and the many glaciers sliding down into this basin. Then we turned around and headed out.

Totally different scene going back. The cloud layer had lowered, so we ran into dense cloud before we got back to the point we were most familiar with. But we cautiously followed the road and it worked out. Then we went on from there downward, broke out of the cloud, and had a nice trip the rest of the way back down to the bears. We stopped at the bear viewing station, but there were no bears, so we went on to dinner at the Bitter Creek Cafe in downtown Stewart.

Dinner was very nice, as usual. We enjoy this place. The Smiths came in after we did, but it was crowded and we couldn't get together.

We went back to the bear viewing place, as did the Smiths. No bears, so we chatted. Then I looked under the bridge and saw a big blob moving there. I yelled "bear", which broke up the conversations as everyone scrambled for their cameras and binoculars. It turned out to be a larger bear that was quite adept at salmon gathering and had markings different from the other bears we'd seen (darker back and rear). It ranged around the place until we just plain got tired of watching it; the mosquitos had come along as well, so we left to go back to the little house.

The Smiths invited us over for a drink, but it just got too late and it started raining again, so we declined that. We cleaned up and downloaded the pictures (258 of them) into the laptop. We discarded about 100 of them, but still have to name them. We'll leave that for tomorrow after our day's trip to Burns Lake, BC.

 

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