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Published: September 1st 2007
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Grizzly Lunch
Chum salmon spawn in Fish Creek. We drove south on the Cassiar Highway to an east-west road going west to Stewart BC and Hyder AK. That road is one of the most beautiful that we’ve seen on our trip, including a very close view of Bear Glacier.
Stewart and Hyder are two very small towns only a few miles and an international border apart. Both are up a fjord at the very southern tip of the Alaska panhandle, and they share almost everything except nationality. Stewart has a few hundred people, down from about 2500 five years ago when a mine closed, while Hyder has fewer than 100. Hyder even shares Stewart’s area code, and Hyder’s community building includes administrative offices, the fire hall, the public library, the US Forest Service offices - and the town school, with 17 students. There are a pizza parlor, two seafood restaurants, two bars, a coffee house, some gift stores, an RV park (Camp Run-a-muck), and a Baptist church. We’re staying at Camp Run-a-muck, which has water and electric hookups (and a few with sewer) and some of the fastest WiFi yet. The only dump station for the area is in Stewart.
Stewart is known to tourists only as
Salmon Glacier
One of the few in the world that you can look DOWN on. the place you go through to get to Hyder (kind of like Tullahoma, I guess). It has more stores, including two grocery stores and actually has paved roads. Hyder is a little more run-down and has no government. It’s run by the community association rather than a government entity, and Hyder residents pay no taxes. Of course, they also get no services (apparently) from the state.
Hyder is known internationally for one thing (kind of like Lynchburg, I guess): bears. It’s located near Fish Creek, where thousands of chum salmon come to spawn each year. During most of the summer, the place is full of black and brown bears, and the Forest Service runs a wildlife observation area three miles away from Hyder. The same road that goes past Fish Creek also goes another 20 miles to Salmon Glacier. You can actually take a hair-raising road along a mountain’s edge to a viewing area looking DOWN on the glacier. Once again, it was embarrassing for the richest country in the world to have the worst potholed dirt road of the entire trip right up to the Canadian border where it immediately switched to an excellent gravel road. We obviously
Play Time
Three grizzly (though black) cubs playing on Fish Creek. have our priorities mixed up here. Even with the good surface, the road is narrow, shoulderless, and hanging over a valley thousands of feet deep. I’d show you some photos, but neither of us could bring ourselves to lie on our bellies to take pictures like we saw some people doing. The road was originally built to access a mine at the end - the last several miles are not maintained and we didn’t try them.
We asked about riding our bicycles to Fish Creek, where the bears are. Although some folks told us that bicyclists riding through the area are known as “meals on wheels”, we were told that it would be OK if we made noise and watched out for the bears. (Person on moving bike = prey if you’re a bear.) We made some noise makers out of soda cans and pebbles and rode on out with no trouble.
The bears were great to watch, though the operation (run by the US Forest Service rather than by the National Park Service as at Katmai) is a little less professional. They let people smoke and talk on the boardwalk and we observed one very close call when a young grizzly grabbed a huge salmon and ran up over a bank and (if a volunteer ranger had not shouted) would have jumped off the bank right on top of two other volunteers who were doing a fish study in the pond nearby. We believe that they should have been called out of the pond as soon as the bear showed up in the river, as (we think) they would have been at Katmai. We saw 5-6 brown bears several times and an equal number of black bears. Most impressive was a black (dark brown?) grizzly sow and her three large cubs. They were fun to watch as a family group when they paraded up the river, play-fighting and catching fish all the way.
Again, we have some great video but will need to get to an excellent WiFi site so that we can upload them to U-tube. We gave it a try at a satellite site, but the upload was too slow and the site timed out. Our advice to wannabe bear watchers is to be patient, and to come at any time of day, not just the 6-9 am and pm suggested by many folks. The bears were there all day - you just had to be in the right place at the right time. This is about as late in the year as you can see the bears, since the spawning season was late this year and many of the fish have already spawned and died.
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