Wildlife

Glacier is awesome for wildlife.   One day I went up to Logan Pass and I really lucked out.  In the parking lot were several rams.  They were battling over something on the ground of the parking lot.  It was pretty cool to see.  The ranger told me that it could have been something that someone spilled or antifreeze.  I had heard from my Bakersfield friends that marmots like antifreeze and they will bit into your hoses to get at it.  In fact I was so paranoid that I bought coyote urine to put around my car so that didn't happen to me.  I wonder what ever happened to that coyote urine.  I also saw the above goat on the trail.  It was being observed by someone from the University of Montana.  He was writing down what it was doing.  He also counted the number of breaths that the mountain goat took.  They were collecting this data for a climate change study to determine how the goat deal with less snowpack each year.

The next day I hiked Two Medicine Pass with Jane.  We saw a moose on the way back.  It was walking through a pond eating.  It would put its head into the water and grab some algae to eat.  That was a very cool experience.  When I was at the Grand Teton National Park, I found out that moose can actually dive down to the bottom of the pond to get a meal.  They can dive down 16ft.  To me that is amazing.  However, when you consider that seal, sea lions, whales and dolphins evolved from land creatures, I guess it is not so amazing.

Yesterday I bumped into a bear scratching its back on a tree.    (See yesterday's blog post at http://thereisonlyonetoday.blogspot.com/2016/07/what-day.html )

Today I thought that I wasn't going to see much in the way of wildlife but I was wrong.  I had hiked out the Highline Trail from Logan Pass to the Garden Wall Overlook.  The clouds came in and there was low visibility.  I saw several marmots but no goats or sheep.  In the last half mile back where the trail narrows to a small ledge with a steep dropoff (people have died falling from it) a small group of people gathered in front of me.  Then I hear the word bear.  Yes in the worse place possible there is a bear on the trail.  We can't get off the trail and neither can the bear.  The bear and its cub head towards us.  We make a rapid retreat picking up other hikers along the way.  After about 10 minutes we get to a place where we can get off the trail.  We group up and make lots of noise.  At this point I can see the bear.  It is a grizzly.  The hump on it back is clearly visible.  It has a cub.  Luckily it makes the good choice and leave the trail and heads up the mountain across from us.  Once it is past we hightail it out of there.  Then we hear the ranger loud speaker telling us a bear is on the trail.  Shortly after that we see a ranger with a big orange gun.  I am not sure if this gun shoot bean bags (a tactic that the rangers sometimes use), bullets or something else.  I may check tomorrow.  Turns out that they had closed the trail at the trailhead and there was a group of rangers and people very interested in our experiences.