Hiking and Kayaking -- Dad blog

---

Yesterday was especially fun—the weather was great—no rain and a bit warmer. We started the day with a hike up “Montana Creek”, which is really close to where were staying. It was a really well kept up trail - almost gravel for quite aways with a good size creek—really more of a river to our right. There were lots of berries to eat along the way - raspberries and salmon berries. We had brought along our geo cache “travel cache” thing to leave - Juli and the boys found it in Winter Park and it said it wanted to travel the world so this was as good of a jump off spot as we could think of. We couldn’t, however, find the cache box, so will likely take to Denali or Kenai. After looking for about 15 mins for the cache, we kept going up the trail. It was a very lush place. We kept getting passed by a guy on a moped who said he was bringing up supplies to his friends and then coming back to get more. Anyway, so awhile further ahead another guy walks towards us coming from where we were going. He is carrying a large rifle. He stops by us and tells us he just passed a bear about a mile up and that the bear was by the river and had “snapped his jawls” at him so to be careful. Dax basically turns to run up the hill towards where the bear is. Jaden and Blaze can’t stop chattering about it (nervous energy), and Juli gets pretty hesitant about going forward. For me, I’m a bit perplexed - we were about done hiking anyway and were going to turn back, and the bear was still a mile away. Also, while the bear encounter in the wild thing made me a bit nervous, I had to admit I wanted to see one (or more), and so this was what we wanted to do. Anyway, we choose to turn around shortly thereafter. So we’re walking back and the guy on the moped comes by and stops. We tell him about the bear thing. He asks us if that is why we turned around and we say yes. He asks if we are carrying a gun and we say no. He then asks us if we want to borrow his pistol. Blaze is so excited he can barely contain himself. I thank him and say no and he takes off. Blaze is incredulous - he wanted to give us a pistol, why didn’t you take it?
We then went sea kayaking with S,K,J, B, C, and P that afternoon. It was really great so I’ll let others talk about it! the highpoint for me was having on 2 separate occasions bald eagles fly from their nests directly above me - once on an island we were walking around, the other from an island Dax and I were kayaking right next to. BTW, there are tons of eagles here - a couple days ago we drove to downtown and on the way say an area close to shore where there were like 50 bald eagles hanging out.

---