This morning a few of us decided to climb Sheep Mountain on our day off. I’ll have to throw something together next week with some of those photos. On my last day off I had a bit of work to do in the evening but on the way back to camp I had a great view of a lynx:

 They are even bigger then I had imagined. Anyways I dont have much time in town this week so ill have to leave it at that.

-Dylan

PS: I updated last week’s post

The story for this week seems pretty similar to last week, since the fresh snowfall melted pretty quickly. The temperature drops just below 0 at night, but is usually 5-6 degrees by 10am. On the 15^th of May we got another huge dumping of snow that started at about 10am and lasted well into the night. We probably got about 30-40 cm of accumulation by the time it had finished. My mom has been bugging me for a photo with my face in it (which is quite difficult to do when I am the one taking the photos), but I thought that this morning was probably a good time to do it:

The day after the snowfall turned out to be an amazing spring day. The temperature got up to about 10 degrees and there was tons of activity in the forest. With the snow on the ground there were tones of fresh lynx, hare, squirrel, mouse and bear tracks.

                Yesterday I had my first bear encounter. I was sitting on a squirrel midden trying to record a squirrel vocalization when a black bear approached me. I made a bit of noise so he knew that I was there, and he started to walk the other direction. About 30 minutes later I ran into him again at another midden. At first I was a bit worried that he was following me, but after making a little bit of noise to get his attention he took a few sniffs, and plopped himself on the ground. The bear seemed completely uninterested in me so I spend about 15 minutes watching him forage for bearberry before I continued on my rounds. The photos arnt the greatest but here they are:

                Spring is definitely just around the corner now. Bears and ground squirrels are out of hibernation, and hares are starting to change color:

                The amount of daylight is increasing at an unbelievable pace as well. Last night I walked to my cabin at 11:30pm and it was still dusk outside. It’s hard to believe that in a few weeks the sun will still be up past midnight.

                And just in case I didn’t give my mother a heart attack with my bear story, I thought I’d throw this photo I took yesterday from the top of an enormous spruce yesterday evening. Don’t worry it was a really safe climb :P.

Until next time!

-Dylan

Originally I was planning on updating this blog every two weeks, but it is incredibly difficult to find time to do anything outside of work this month. Unfortunately this also means that my camera has been sitting in its case for a majority of my time here.  Even in Haines Alaska last month, I really didn’t seem to get many photographs

                The drive to Haines was absolutely stunning. The drive from Haines Junction, Yukon to Haines, Alaska was about 3 and a half hours long. The first half of the drive goes up into the mountains, past the tree line and into tundra. After crossing the border into the states, the road drops down into redwood forest and all the way down to sea level. When we got there, we wandered around town for a while and went to the Brewery (The beer in the North is amazing), and then went for dinner at a community barbeque. There was a pretty sweet live band playing, and we sat around and drank plenty of delicious local beer (the brewer was at the barbeque as well). We started off the next morning with a hike. There were tonnes of Bald Eagles and Goldeneyes all over the place:

That afternoon we were invited to a locals place for fresh fish and chips. We stayed there for dinner and left back to the Junction in the early evening.

                It has been getting a lot warmer these past few weeks. As of May 7^th most of the snow had disappeared from our squirrel grid, but we had yet another 10-15cm of snow on the 8^th. Although I’m definitely ready for spring, the fresh snow made for some really nice scenery once the clouds had cleared. 

           

Some of the birds are starting to sing, and the grouse are starting to drum. Im sure spring is just around the corner.