Hunting Bear...
Yesterday, a random girl fro my work (the same one who went with me to Byers Lake) and I went to Troublesome Creek. She's very woods-wise, and I'm very much in awe of her knowledge of the area, though apparently my untrained tracking skills are on par with her trained ones.... Dunno if that's good or bad. Anyhow, we were looking for bears so I could take pictures of them. Just because she's woods-wise doesn't mean she's wise. I figured I'd better tag along because I knew she's be going regaurdless. And oging looking fo rbears when you're unarmed is stupid, but going looking for bears unarmed by yourself is much stupider. I doped myself up with so much deet the bears could prolly smell us a mile away. Plus it was rainy out, so bears prolly wouldn't be about. Antyhow, we hiked a few miles back along the creek, then she slogged down the middle of the creek for a ways (Alaskans call it a creek...in Idaho, it would be a river). I stayed on land and caught her around the bend of the creek where a handy dandy log made it so that I could cross out to her without getting myself or my mostly broken digital camera wet. So we sat for a while and enjoyed the countryside, then went back. We found some (ripe, believe it or don't!) blueberries, and she indulged (I helped her--I dont much like blueberries raw), and along the way I pointed out all the signs of bear we had passed on the way in, and some of the local edible vegitation (fireweed doesn't taste so good after a rainstorm). On the way out, towards the end, I stepped on one end of a log that was crossing the trail, and it shifted in such a way that it made a rustle in the bushes. She stopped righ tnext to the bushes and held her hands out for silence. So I waitd for a moment, then jumped on the log. The bushes next to her surged and she jumped back two feet. The expression on her face was absolutely hilarious. She called me over and told me she thought there was something in the bush. So I walked back over to the log and demonstrated by jumping on it. She was about ready to kill me, but neither one of us could stop laughing long enough to. So I guess even the woods-wise can be fooled.