Wildlife Sighting!

This was the most incredible day for seeing wildlife along the road – specifically, bison/buffalo and black bears!  I’m not including all the images, just the ones that seemed to show them off the best…..

 

In another posting (On the Road to Watson Lake), I talked about a very foolish woman who was standing much too close to some bison.  These are the big boys she was up close and almost too personal with!  We were viewing them from our RV, nice and safe!  We saw a number of bison like this when we were at Yellowstone National Park last year, and one of the more interesting things about them is that when they move, they sort of grunt like a pig.  You’d think something of this size (these 2 are probably around 2,000 lbs. each) would make a bigger noise than that….

 

Here’s one of the black bears we saw on this day’s travel.  It’s interesting to note that there are also a fair number of people (more that I would have guessed there would be) who ride their bikes (laden with tents, sleeping bags, and their gear – I wouldn’t last a block biking all that stuff!) along the highway heading up to or back from Alaska.  I asked Jeff if it wasn’t dangerous being around the bears (they tend to swing way wide of the bison, who leave them alone….besides bison don’t eat people), given that the bears are along the side of the road, and he said that at this time of the year, there’s so much other stuff for the bears to eat, they really aren’t interested in people.  Hmmmm…..hope all those cyclists are back home before it gets to be later in the season and there isn’t so much for them to eat.

 

Here are a couple other bison we saw further along the road.  We slowed way down and swung way wide to avoid them – they would definitely do some damage to our rig if they had a mind to.  In all, on this leg of our journey, we easily saw at least a dozen bison.

 

I couldn’t resist sharing this image of a shy bear with you!  He’s in the left center of the image, peeking out from behind some bushes.  He was very “into” the grasses and stuff that were over there.  As for the number of bear we saw on this day, I think we probably saw just about as many bear as bison, which is saying a lot, since bison tend to be herd animals and bears…..not so much!

Enjoy!