Chowing down before winter gets here.
Mom and baby moose in the yard this afternoon doing a job on the bushes as they try to pack on as much weight as possible before winter sets in. Both looking good and healthy.
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Autumn approaches quickly.
The colors around the yard are changing rapidly as the season changes. The transition to winter is slowly upon us.
Reaching for the good stuff.
Healthy youngster in the front yard this afternoon. Eating as much as possible before winter sets in.
A beautiful backyard visitor this morning.
A Steller's Jay paid a visit this morning. We haven't seen them around for most of the summer, so it must mean the seasons are changing and fall is definitely in the air. They'll be migrating through in the coming weeks. Some will stay all winter, others will head further south.
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Denali trip, Fall 2017
We headed up to Denali National Park and Preserve on Thursday, August 24th for our last trip to the park this season. We spent four days mountain biking the Park Road, using the shuttle buses to take the bikes to the top of a pass, and then using gravity to coast to the bottom :) We call this the Denali Downhill. After setting up camp at Teklanika campground inside the park, we managed to get the bikes on a shuttle bus around 3 pm and head up to Sable Pass. It turned out that a section of Igloo Canyon and the walk-in campground at Igloo Creek were closed to both hikers and bikers because of a couple of problem juvenile delinquent bears who had decided to explore a tent at Igloo a couple of weeks earlier. No one was inside at the time, but this was unusual behavior, plus these bears had been interacting a bit too much with the shuttle buses on the road, so the Rangers decided to do some aversion therapy with them. They've set up a tent with an electric fence around it to shock them if they do it again, and they've also been following these bears along the Park Road shooting them with bean bag slugs if they get too curious with buses, etc. All this leads to the fact that we saw nine bears within a mile in Igloo Canyon in our first half hour! It's gonna be another fun trip, so come along for the ride. Click on the images for full-screen and then cursor over for captions!
