Bears & Fish & Volcanoes

On the recommendation of our son-in-law Don Roberts plus some RV'ers we met, we "bit the bullet" and scheduled a fly-in fishing/bear watching trip. To pay for it, we decided to spend our children's inheritance! :-) We had to be at the lake at 6:30 am, so when we awoke & were ready to leave, this moose appeared out our RV front window!

Here she is just looking at us while Jim shoots me in the front seat! "Don't go out to the car yet, Lynda" :-)

This is the plane on a lake near Soldotna. It's a Cessna 208 maybe, that is a turbo-prop that seats 9 people. It is quite new and per one of the guides, cost $1.8 million and is still only a single engine! The plane took is to Big River Lake, where we got into a 19' flat bottom, aluminum boat with a 50 HP Yamaha outboard. Rodney, our guide for the day, took us to where Wolverine Ccreek empties into the lake. There, many Sockeye Salmon were waiting in the lake to go up the creek.

This was our first visitor when we arrived at Wolverine creek. He's about 3 years old. He came to the same spot to fish. Take a look at those claws! And get ready to be bored with lots of bear photos!

Here he is turning over rocks for the scraps of dead fish that wash down the creek from the carnage above.

Now he's fishing in the lake. He just emerged from putting his head underwater!

Again, see the water dripping off his chin!

Now it looks like he is stalking some fish! We're sitting in the boat being totally ignored by him.

Now he's checking us out. It's OK, as long as he is not stalking me!

This was another futile attempt to land a fish. See the water drip off his chin.

He was fascinating!

He's getting closer to our boat!

Guess he cares more for his food than us! (We'd be tough to eat, anyway!)

He even swam around trying to catch a fish!

Nice profile, eh?

This is not in focus 'cause we had accidently turned the "auto focus" button on the camera to "manual focus", but it shows him looking underwater. That was fun to watch!

This is a second bear visitor. Note the sea gull! They made a lot of racket when the bear was in their territory. Big Brave Seagull! Maybe she was cheering him on so she could get the scraps.

Does it get any better than this? It is so beautiful!

He is about to pounce!

Nope, just to look, I guess! Neither of these bears were very successful and we didn't dare catch a fish while they were around.

One last try at these elusive salmon! He can see a bunch of them in the water in front of him.

Here he is getting out of the water and looking at these other people in a boat as if to say, "Can I eat them?"

I guess he decided they were too old & tough! Neither of these bears ever came out of the water with a fish in their mouth! Maybe they weren't the best fishermen!

This shows the line-up of boats trying to catch salmon at the mouth of Wolverine Creek. There were several outfitters there. Each boat load was given 45 minutes in the closest spot.

We bought a one day fishing license, so here is Jim catching his first of two salmon! What a fisherman!

There was a little waterfall around the bend, which made for a nice photo backdrop.
Here is an Eagle on her nest, high in a tree near the waterfall. Can you see the white head?

Our guide, Rodney, whipped out a portable gas grill, filleted one of Jim's fish and we had salmon for lunch. This grill fit right on the floor of this aluminum boat. When we were back at the mainland, we had the other fish filleted and flash frozen to put in our freezer!

This is a view of some rocky, hilly alpine terrain which we flew over.

This is a beautiful blue glacier lake high in the mountains.

This is a massive glacier. Can you see it coming down, flowing like a river? It is so deep and heavy, that it is cutting out the rock under it and depositing it at it's foot. The debris coming out at the foot is called a moraine.

From January to April of this year, a volcano here called Redoubt erupted and covered a lot of the glaciers with black ash. When the sun came out in the summer, the dark color absorbed the heat of the sun and began melting the glacier underneath. Here's some rough glacier surface that still has ash on it that it causing melting that normally would not occur.

Another picture where the ash is even darker.

Like a flowing river, it flows in slow motion from year to year.

The glacier against the canyon wall.

The pilot did a great job of flying his plane around, but didn't say a word about what we were looking at... I got one of the guides sitting behind me to tell me what we were seeing. This is the plume from Mt Redoubt telling us he's still alive. This is the one that earlier this year threw out all the ash.

Distant view of the glacier in the forground and Mt Redoubt with it's plume of smoke in the background. There's no roads anywhere around here...none.

Though you can't see their dock or building in this shot, this is the lake just outside Soldotna, Alaska from which Talon Air operates their tour and flying service. On the flight out, they had a young woman about 22 that did not get off the plane with us. They flew her to some remote village to which she wanted to go for some reason.