…I saw a bear. Do you know that song? We used to sing it when I was in Girl Scouts when I was young. Well, it is now more than just a song to me! I saw a real live bear the other day. Not just one, but two!!!!!!! Big, ginormous, hungry, blackberry-eating black bears.

We went out to this river which is a couple of hours north. We were just going to look for bears and other wildlife and maybe do a little fishing. (Of course once Mark heard the word “fishing” he immediately envisioned the granddaddy salmon being attached to his line. Needless to say, we lost him at some point. He cared not about bears or elk or anything else. Just the fish…..) Well…as soon as we turned on to this lttle dirt road off the big dirt road, we saw a bear. He was so cute and seemed so cuddly. He ran across the road and then hung out by a tree to see what we would do. I tried to get a picture of him but he ran away before I could. Grrrrr!

We stopped at a few places to try to catch some fish. Mark hooked a couple of anchovies on his line. Ok, they weren’t really anchovies. They were some other kind of fish that are supposed to get up to like 15 pounds, but Mark’s looked like anchovies. While we were there, we saw this:

This dude was HUGE and FAT and I wouldn’t want him coming at me, that’s just all I need to say about that! We went to a few more places and down an even smaller road and that’s where we saw our second black bear. He was bigger than the first and he darted across the road. He didn’t seem as friendly as our first bear.

We also saw some river otters playing around. This place is like a real live zoo, I tell ya! No cages, no nothing. Which is a little unnerving. Like when we saw the first bear, we drove a little ways up the road and got out to talk the dogs and there was all this bear poop on the road. Let’s just say I wasn’t feeling exactly comfortable. But Sig (You’ll remember, he was our boat captain from the crabbing day), told me that there haven’t been any deaths in 20 years here from bears. Of course he also told me that he usually comes with a gun or something and this time he had nothing. Greaaaaat……

Anyways, the day was nice, the weather was warm and the animals were amazing!!!! You people gotta come visit this place! Just take a look:

scenic.jpg                   scenic-2.jpg