Thursday, January 26, 2012

Back to the Dempster 2011 – Part 14 a

This would be one of the better days of our trip…but before we start on it, I’m just going to pop back to the day before….it seems when I was organizing photos…I didn’t do a very good job and I want to show a few things I missed…

The Arctic Circle

We’ll start with this one back at the Arctic Circle…just because…

Elephant rock in the distance

Then I want to show this…this is the Blackstone River and Elephant Rock is in this picture…you can see how easy it is to miss!

Elephant rock

now we have zoomed in on the rock formation (this was 20x optical zoom)

Elephant rock

and for an even closer look…Ernie was using a Nikon with a 36x optical zoom…

Rock formations

This is another of Ernie’s pictures…  So, back to the day at hand…we woke up and got ready to leave.  Just as we were about to pull out, a pick up truck pulled in and parked right across our campsite drive…we wondered what on earth was going on – had a slight guilt as we hadn’t paid either night we’d stayed at Engineer Creek Campground, and neither had anyone else, because there were no self register envelopes left…but no, the person asked us which way we were headed and when we said, ‘back to Tombstone’ she said that there were a Grizzly sow and cub feeding right at the side of the road just down from the campground, the way we were headed.  We thanked her for the heads up ….

Grizzly Sow and cub at side of the road

and sure enough…there they were..mom on the left…  Since you don’t get to be this close to Grizzly’s very often…the rest of this post is going to be pictures of these two…

Cub with sow in the background

here is a closer picture of the cub…these are taken from inside the truck…

Mom

Mom moved off here and this demonstrates how they just blend in with the habitat…

Mom in the bush

Really, would you know she was there if you hadn’t watched her walk there?

The cub

the cub continued to feed quite close to the truck…

an itch break

Mom settled up on the hillside and proceeded to have a good scratch..

Too close

the cub is now getting a little too close!

she is watching though

Mom is keeping a very close eye on the situation….and these things, for all their size, can move very fast…

Mom on the move

Mom decides that enough is enough and she starts up the hillside…

Better go join mom

and junior decides he better follow mom.  This made for a great start to the day…which we’ll continue next post…

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