October 10, 2007

Fall is hanging on by a thread. It was 19 degrees one morning. We still have some colorful trees, but one windy day and it is all over.

The weekend was nice. It was a little rainy heading into the weekend so we stayed in on Saturday. I worked on organizing the garage. I found the studs in the wall. The drywall appears to be spaced out a little ways on horizontal steel studs on 24” centers. The vertical wood studs behind there are on normal 16” centers, but a couple of them were slightly off. My screws were long enough and I now have lots of shelf space for storing gear. It is amazing how much space is in the garage now that we got the piles moved off the floor.

We went up on the hillside on Sunday. We found a trail that we hadn’t hiked before. We started at an elevation of about 500 feet and slowly climbed along Campbell Creek up to close to 2000 feet. We were able to make a 9 mile loop. Light snow had fallen Saturday night all the way down below 500 feet. The trail was an interesting consistency. The previous day’s footprints were frozen in the mud and lightly dusted with snow. It was exciting to see that the top prints in the mud were bears. It was also exciting to be the first tracks in the snow. We found some moose prints and one set of bear prints on top of the snow.

We saw a bear. A lone grizzly was grazing high up on a hillside, near some dall sheep. The sheep moved away when they noticed the bear. The bear was probably eating frozen berries. I had a few handfuls of frozen crowberries. The coldness was a strange sensation with the flavor of the berries. It probably didn’t bother the bear. We saw dozens of dall sheep on the ridges high above us as well.

We did see quite a few moose. They seemed to be hanging out in couples. We almost had to witness nature taking its course, but the female wandered off from the male with only one antler. We saw several couples and they all seemed a little skittish. We have been able to approach moose this time of year on the hillside before, but this time they seemed to want to get away from us. It was still nice to see some moose.

Our enjoyment of putting fresh footprints into the snow on the trail came to an end when a jogger passed us. I didn’t understand this person. He was listening to music through headphones while jogging. The music just seems like an intrusion to me. The jogging seems like an unnecessary infliction of pain. But I really don’t understand limiting your senses while potentially triggering predatory behavior on a trail that was clearly traveled by bears within the last few hours. While I try not to be judgmental of people who enjoy the wilderness in different ways than I, this guy seemed to be lacking in judgment.