You Wait Two Weeks For A Bear...

Days 11-14

“Super, Natural British Columbia Welcomes You” reads the sign and it certainly does!

We're no longer looking out at forests and mountains, we're riding through them and it's beautiful. Over the last couple of days we've also had our first bear sightings! The first was a smallish black bear on the stretch that we mentioned in the last post. We saw him on side of the road on our way to some beautiful natural hot springs, along with a good number of buffalo. Yesterday we popped into Hyder, Alaska for a few hours to watch grizzlies fishing at Fish Creek – one of the rivers that salmon swim up from the sea to reach their breeding grounds. Just seeing the great big salmon swimming up stream was quite a sight. We had to be pretty patient, waiting for around an hour for a bear just to walk down the river; but then another hour later one came and caught a fish and ate it right across the bank in front of us. Just as we were thinking we'd seen what we came for another bear showed up – an older, bigger one, that chased the first downstream a bit – they share the section of river, but the more senior bear gets the best fishing spot. They then took it in turns to do some more fishing which was spectacular to watch. Only our hungry tummies could tear us away after a few hours – we too had fish for dinner after seeing how good they looked! We couldn't leave right away, though, because another, younger bear turned up and was blocking the exit.

Now of course bears are everywhere: we had to make a pretty abrupt stop en route to see some old totem poles for a black bear crossing in front of us.

We've continued to meet more and more other travellers on the roads, both those in some of the massive RVs (Recreational Vehicles, like camper vans but some are as big as a commercial coach, and tow a large pickup behind!) and fellow bikers too, and have enjoyed chatting with everyone. Just in the last couple of days, though, we've started re-meeting some people who we came across days before, which makes for a nice friendly small-world feeling.