The Animal Episode

There have been a number of fun animal interactions this summer, so I've decided to dedicate this post to them.

Just yesterday Luke was biking on a trail in Brevard NC. He came flying out of a bushy rhododendron area only to end up biking right in between two black bears. The bears took off in opposite directions. This was a first for Luke!
He also saw a very large black snake, who he had to poke off the trail with a long stick. And he saw a turkey. The turkey was well behaved.

Luke had also recently seen a big black bear in Tennessee, but it sadly was extremely skinny and out of it (presumably from hunger). Very upsetting. Apparently the acorns season was quite poor this year, so they were signs posted to expect to see more bears than normal in the lower areas, looking for food. The bear population has been soaring after they were reintroduced about 20 years ago. Hopefully this doesn't mean that a bunch of them will be starving this year.

Luke sees many more bears than I do. I suspect I'm not fast enough to surprise them, and that they can hear my panting from a mile away. I'm not complaining, by the way.

The next exciting animal encounter was back a couple of months ago, in Bellingham. We were at a beaver dam and managed to sneak up on the beaver so we could watch it for a bit. It was diving in the water and coming up every 30 seconds or so, chewing. This went on for a bit, until I tried to sneakily take a photo with my phone. The phone make a little click sound and that was enough to alert the beaver to our presence. It started swimming along, parallel to us, until ==SMACK==, it slapped the water with its tail and dove away. Very dramatic! Sadly, after all that I didn't even get a good photo of the beaver because my phone camera sucks.

While we were in Tennessee we saw a lot of insect action.

Gross caterpillar nest

This was a spider/caterpillar show down. The spider kept trying to bite the caterpillar, but just got mouthfuls of fluff. The caterpillar wriggled until the spider jumped back, then it managed to get free of the web. Caterpillar wins!

Grasshopper that looks like a leaf. One of these jumped on my face a couple of days later.

Then there were the orb spiders. These were everywhere! They make very pretty webs and aren't poisonous, which is good since both Luke and I got a number of these on our heads as we were biking.

I've never seen spikes like these on a spider before! I went to the Big Fork Ranger Station to ask about what kind of spider these are. Both rangers gave me a funny/grossed out look and proclaimed that they don't know anything about spiders (these spiders are *everywhere*, so I was surprised that they didn't know anything at all about them). Internet and google came to the rescue and identified it for us. Not sure what they learn in ranger school, but spider identification is not in the curriculum.

I met a couple of very nice gentlemen from the Asheville area yesterday and learned from them that the long-leggy squirrels we've been seeing in the area are 'boomers'. They are super fast and acrobatic. I also learned that the chestnut-looking nuts are buckeyes, and that they say that if you carry one around with you, you'll stay healthy. I also learned that the buckeyes are partly poisonous, and they say that if you want to know what parts you can eat, ask the squirrels. 'They' have charming sayings, I think.

July and some August

Soooo, after Ed's visit we went up to B.C. and revisited Pemberton, Squamish and Vancouver. First we checked out the downhill trails in Abbotsford. I rode Squid Line, while Luke did some more ambitious stuff up higher.
We spent a lovely few days with our friends Phil and Mary-Lin in Squamish. There was good coffee, eating, swimming and biking. So sweet!
We then went to Vancouver to see our friends Holly and Alex, and to see Luke's brother Andrew who just moved to Vancouver a month before. We did the grouse grind with Andrew (and watched some of the horribly cheesy lumberjack show at the top), and Holly is always up for some difficult biking with Luke.

After a great couple of weeks in BC, we headed back down to the Bellingham WA area. We made a trip out to Anacortes, Levenworth, and the Mt.Baker area too. As I had mentioned, Luke's bike frame had cracked and we had to wait for the replacement frame to show up.
Here's a cute moment from our trip out to Mt.Baker. We were having breakfast at a little picnic area and I found this little mouse trapped in the bathroom.

It must have been in there for a while because it was very hungry and very lethargic. The very first thing it did was jam an old spider web in its mouth, and then proceeded to eat and eat and eat everything else it saw. It got progressively more spunky and eventually it was energetic enough to hop away into the woods.
Here's the view from the river right next to the picnic area. I wasn't able to capture the vibrant blue of the glacier water (I need more lessons from Luke it seems).

Luke's frame came just in time for us to meet up with our friend Ed, who brought his family along this time too! They did a big road trip of Canada and the US this summer and we were lucky to spent a couple of weeks with them.
We started in the Port Angeles area of the Olympic Peninsula, then headed over to Duthie (which was a huge success because Duthie is the best!). We then went down to Hood River and Bend Oregon, and ended the trip with Sun Valley Idaho. The last two times we went to Sun Valley we were pretty much rained out, so it was nice to actually spent some time on the trails this time. Luke even found some gold in a river!

We went to a great area just outside of Sisters Oregon that had....LAVA! It was the Dee Wright Observatory, where they made a little building out of lava rocks a bunch of decades ago. Here it is, with the moon still in the sky:

I learned a lot about A A Lava, thanks to the plaques along an info trail that was made. This is a kipuka, the little islands of tree that were spared during the most recent lava flows.

Are our bikes going for a ride without us? Har har!

The observatory had these neat little windows which identified the volcano you could see as you peaked through.

Here are some more snowy volcanos, along with the A A.

We're now in Jackson and Driggs WY. We were rained out the last time we were here too, so we're doing unfinished business. The traffic and amount of tourists is pretty horrible in Jackson, since it's so close to Yellowstone. I would hate to see how busy the park is right now. Luckily things get much less crowded once you leave Jackson.