Bear Sightings

All of our guides recently received a letter warning us about the bears in the area. Apparently there are about seven black bear sows that have recently swatted away their cubs in order to make room for more. The cubs were raised in the forest right next to the Visitor Center, so they often hang around there since it's the only area they know. And because they're trying to learn how to be bears, their behavior can be unpredictable and erratic, so one must exercise caution when near one. The very next day after I received the letter, I saw a little bear crossing the road while I walked my group to the East Glacier trailhead. Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me, and I was too concerned about the safety of my group to snap a picture with my phone. We watched it, then we got out of there! Sure, the baby bears are cute, but they can easily kill. There are plenty of reports that prove this.

I've seen several of the young bears since, each time when I haven't had my camera on me. So here are some phone photos!

This young bear was eating some grass and leaves by Steep Creek. My group and I spotted him after walking the Moraine Ecology Trail. This sighting was icing on the cake since we had just gone whale watching and saw some pretty amazing whales!

 

Saw this little guy in the bus parking lot right at the beginning of a hiking tour for East Glacier Trail. He was digging around on the hill for some tasty roots.

Right after we saw the little guy in the parking lot, we walked down the street and saw another little bear up in a tree. Apparently a larger bear was chasing him around the parking lot earlier and got a little frisky. The smaller bear decided he'd be safer up in a tree, so he climbed up there and fell asleep. Aww..

More to come!

Ice Caves- Round 2!

So a friend of mine brought back some excellent pictures from the ice caves the day before yesterday. I became instantly jealous and decided to go again, since last time there weren't any actual caves to go into.

After I finished my whale watching tour, I hurried back home where Gina, my roommate, was waiting for me. We hopped into her car, stuck Coco in the back seat and went on our way to the caves! It's a good thing that Gina and I are in pretty good shape because we had to hurry; we left a little after 5PM. Luckily we don't have to worry about the sun going down too early since it doesn't get dark until after 10PM or so. I brought my dad's flashlight and some extra batteries anyway, just in case (thanks dad!).

It didn't take us long at all to get to the hazardous unmaintained trail sign. I was worried that once we got to the difficult trail, Coco would start getting in the way. How in the world could a dog scramble up the huge rocky cliffs that we had to climb? I had forgotten this was the famous bear-fighting, porcupine-eating Coco we're talking about. She can do anything. And she certainly made it there just fine!

Coco posing in front of the glacier. She even hopped up onto it and ran around a few times.. more than I could do! She's a glacier-climbing dog now!

Coco explores the ice caves. Dogs are colorblind though, right? Wonder if she noticed that the ice was blue..

Beautiful blue light streams down and through the glacier into this cave.

I found a large tunnel underneath the glacier, so I just had to crawl through it!

 

I slipped into the rain gear that I always have in my pack for this tunnel. Boy was it wet in there!

Here is a series of photos I took of the walls in the tunnel.

Now you can see why I'm so obsessed with getting good pictures of the ice! Aren't these colors and textures just beautiful? I haven't altered these pictures in any way.. it's really this blue!

 

Gina and I both got pretty muddy. Yep, I'm the shoes on the right. (Don't worry, mom, I cleaned them up! Love the boots by the way!) Crawling through the tunnels was a muddy experience. Just trying to stand up was difficult. I could feel my body sinking deeper into the mud with each passing moment. And this isn't your ordinary mud- this is glacial mud! Because the glacier is a river of moving ice, it carves through the mountainsides and scrapes up the rocks as it passes. Within the ice, the silt is carried and deposited at the face of the glacier into the lake. There are mounds and mounds of glacial silt, and it's so fine that once within the lake, it never really settles. The lake always has a milky appearance because of this. And all the fine sand that surrounds the lake gives it a beach-like appearance. But if you've got lots of that incredibly fine, fresh silt that's still right underneath the glacier, mixing with streams of runoff beneath it, you make for pits that are almost like quicksand. I sure had trouble getting out of there!

And just so you can see how much the glacier's been changing, here's another shot of its face. Keep in mind that it moves forward about a foot a day, but melts about a foot and a half a day. That's why it never looks the same, and the caves can be different weekly!

These large chunks that have begun floating out toward the center of the lake were probably the face of the glacier in the last photos I posted. The face has been calving a lot recently!

 

Coco waits for Gina and me at the top of a rocky cliff on the way back. She had no trouble at all scrambling up the sides of the bare rock. Well... she did need a boost, but just once. :)

Enjoy the photos! I'll make sure to post more soon.

Happy 4th!!

It's officially the 4th of July! And you know what that means- FIREWORKS!!

Here in Juneau, they do the fireworks a little earlier than I'm used to. This is because the sky doesn't turn completely dark until after 11PM. If they were to wait until that late on the actual 4th, it would slip into the 5th and not be Independence Day anymore. So to avoid this, they do the fireworks right at midnight on the morning of the 4th.

I went out on Van's sailboat again tonight with some friends from work to view the show. I'd say it was the best seat in the house! They launch the fireworks right from a barge in the harbor near the cruise ships, so we were able to get pretty close for a great view. These were definitely the best fireworks I've seen so far.

And of course, I was able to capture some of the show on video for all of you! Enjoy, and happy 4th!

Fireworks Video

One Month

Today, it's been exactly one month since I arrived here in Juneau! It's pretty amazing.. it seems like the time just flew by. But I suppose that I have been pretty busy.

I finally completed my boat crew training. Soon I'll be giving whale watching tours by myself, so it's important to be a certified deck hand in the case that something happens to the captain while out at sea. If something happens, I have to know how to drive the boat to a safe location and radio the Coast Guard. I also have to know how to rescue people from the water, what to do in the event of a fire, and how to handle a ship that is taking on water. Hopefully none of these scenarios ever actually occur!

These are some of our whale watching vessels. The first boat is the Sounder. It's a much larger boat than the second one- the Voyager. These are the two that we practiced on for our training.

Captain Steve tells us about safety on board the boats.

This is a water-proof body suit that we filled with heavy bottles of water in order to simulate the Man Overboard drill. One of our guides chucked him off the bow of the boat and then we had to go through all the necessary steps to rescue him. It's really important to do this quickly; 5 min in the cold Alaskan waters can lead to hypothermia, and just 20 min is enough to cause death.

When we hear the splash and cry out "Man Overboard," we have to grab a red cushion and throw it into the water as close to the person as possible. This is a marker that will tell the boat captain which direction he needs to steer the ship in order to reach the person. Next, we have to grab a life preserver and try to toss it to the victim. The rope on the preserver is short and a normal person cannot throw it very far, so you have to be pretty close to the victim for it to be effective. If the preserver doesn't work, or the victim has lost consciousness, you have to grab a hook and try to move them toward the boat with it. Eventually, you can get the fallen passenger to the side of the vessel, where you have to physically pull them up. It's important to do this effectively, or you could become a victim yourself by falling in. Throw on a life vest, make a loop with a yellow cord and place it around your right shoulder, and have someone else hold on to the back of your pants. Next, you lower yourself out the side as closely to the victim as you can. Then you grab their arm with yours, transfer the loop onto their body, under both their arms, and yank them aboard.

Here's Emily, grabbing the heavy dummy and transferring the yellow cord around it.

Man overboard! I'm tossing the life preserver to the dummy.

I've looped the dummy! Now it's time to reel him in.

We also all took turns driving the boats. We practiced shifting gears, making turns, and steering toward objects.

Here I am taking the boat out for a spin before docking it in the harbor at Auke Bay.

See you out on the water!

Coco Update

So Coco is doing much better now. It's good that we brought her to the vet when we did because she was hurt much more severely than we had realized. It turns out that it WAS a brown bear that attacked her because the gash was much too deep to have been a black bear (which are smaller). The wound went deep into her snout, punctured her sinus cavity, and left a hole in the roof of her mouth! Poor Coco!

She got stitched up and is on antibiotics now. She is such a trooper! The only thing that she acts upset about is that her head has a cone on it to keep her from scratching at the stitches. Other than that, Coco shows no pain. She's had encounters with bears like this before, and pain makes her angry. If she gets hurt, it only riles her up more and makes her want to keep attacking! Coco's owner says that usually twice a year, Coco will attack the porcupines in the area. This typically results in someone prying her mouth open and reaching down her throat with pliers to yank out all the quills. And the amount of quills down Coco's throat are so great in number that you KNOW they couldn't have been from just one bite- she goes back for more!

It turns out that the bear Coco was chasing has been living in our yard, sleeping in the bushes! There is a bear trail behind the trash burning area where the vegetation has been trampled, and behind that, a bear bed. It's a depression in the grass where the bear has been sleeping.. and it's pretty close to the house! Coco's owner says that this happens a lot, so she's going to have to get a trap for the bear so that it can be relocated. This bear will be back, no question about it.

Coco's owner is standing in the bear trail, right where the battle between Coco and the bear took place the night before. The burnt grassy area in the foreground is where the bear was looking for food.

There is a trodden down path through the grass where the bear has been walking through the yard.

And this is where the bear has been sleeping behind the bushes.

Usually the trap will be baited with dead salmon, which is supposed to attract the bear right away. Coco's owner says that this doesn't work well, because bears prefer sweet things. After several days of unsuccessful luring, a slice of birthday cake usually does the trick.

I'll make sure to keep you all updated about our bear problem! Stay safe out there!

Coco vs. the Bear

Coco, the household dog,  is pretty brave and would do anything to protect her home. She frequently chases bears away from the yard and warns us of any oncoming danger. Unfortunately, there was a bit of an incident with a bear in the yard this evening.

Tonight, Coco wanted out badly. Once she got outside, she bolted toward the trash pile in the yard. (Many people here have an area in their yard to burn trash in order to reduce the amount they have take to the dump. Our pile was recently burned.) It was twilight, so it was difficult to actually see what was going on, but I could make out a large brown lump near the trash pile. I assume that this was the bear. Coco started barking and going crazy, which made the bear flee instantly into the nearby bushes. Coco bounded after it into the bushes, leading to a lot of commotion. I kept calling Coco, trying to get her to come back inside, but she wouldn't come. All I could hear were the sounds of breaking tree branches and Coco's barking.

I called and called until finally she jumped back out from the bushes and ran at full force back into the house. I chased after her and closed the door behind us. She was riled up and panting pretty heavily. Coco seemed okay and was acting normally otherwise. Then I got a good look at her face. There was a large gash on her muzzle, which looked pretty deep, and she had a narrow strip of fur sticking up out of it at an odd angle. The bear must've swiped her right across the face with its claws. She didn't seem to be in any pain, so we calmed her down and put some ointment on it for now.  She's going to have to see the vet in the morning.. might need stitches this time.

Ice Cave Videos

Thought you might like to see some videos I took when we were walking near the glacier! The really good caves had just recently collapsed, so there were really just a bunch of ledges and arches. Still really interesting to see though! Just click the videos below to view!


Video 1

Video 2

The second video is just us girls acting silly. In our song, we use the word "moraine." This simply means a glacial deposit of rock.

See you next time!