Advertisement
Grouse Mountain is in North Vancouver and is only a 20 min drive from the city. In the winter it is a ski resort and in the summer they have stuff on like mountain zip lines; eagle demonstrations and lumber jack shows but what we were going for was to see Coola and Grinder, the grizzly bears who have lived there for over 10 years. The bears are not related but were found as cubs within weeks of each other. One was lying next to its dead mother who had been hit by a car and the other was found in a forest malnourished and dehydrated. Long story, but they live in a 5 acre habitat at the top of Grouse Mountain enclosed only by an electric fence. We were stood about 3 feet from one of them who came right over to us, stood up on his hind legs and was sniffing us. We mustn't have smelt like a good dinner as he turned round and walked off. Absolutely amazing to be so close to a grizzly bear.
We did the zip lines, I didn't bottle it! I loved the actual zip line but I didn't like
the braking system, I'm sure we are going to feel like we have been ran over tomorrow. Great views when I remembered to keep my eyes open.
It is the end of the ski season up there but there is still a lot of snow. It felt bizarre to be wearing a t shirt with jeans and wellies, it was a glorious, sunny 22 degrees but still about 10 foot of melting snow. They are still allowing snow shoeing and snow boarding and they open the Tubes at weekend. Basically, you sit in a rubber ring and get pushed down a slope. Good fun but we only did two runs as you then had to drag yourself and your ring to the top again through the melting snow. I was supposed to video Ian coming down but didn't realise til he was at the bottom that I hadn't took the lens cap off the camera. Oops!
Had a night out at the casino but the house won tonight. We leave Vancouver Sunday and have the long drive to the bear ranch. Think it is about 6 hours to Osoyoos for an overnight stop and
then another 7 hours on Monday until we arrive at Meadow Creek. Just been checking the weather and they too have a little heat wave - sunny and 21 degrees.
Today has been the best day so far and Tofino is now a distant memory. Let's hope the bear ranch keeps on this run of every day being better than the previous one.
I just can't get photos to load on to here at the moment. In Tofino we had a very poor Internet connection and they zipped on no problem but now they upload very slowly and then tell us the upload has failed. Have literally 100s of photos so you will have to wait til we get home to bore you all!!!!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.115s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 9; qc: 47; dbt: 0.0765s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb