We wanted to share with you some of the evidence of our local wildlife that we spotted over the weekend while working on the trail up to Abhau Lake. Warren, myself, our new handlers Max and Macha, and our handler from last year Annie who is here for a visit, went out to work on the trail and about 10 miles from the house we saw the first of a few sets of Grizzly bear tracks. They were from the day before we were there. We did not see the actual bear, but the tracks it left were large. It reminds us how much we are the minor players in our new neighborhood and has me at least wanting to learn more about the habits and behaviors of the average Grizzly before I actually encounter one on the trail.

The trail we were working on is going to be a great one to run on. While we have had a few minor dustings of snow, about 5 inches or so with the last storm, we still don’t have enough to be running on sleds yet. We got about 26 miles of the trail cleaned up, only a small bit left to go to be ready to run it. We are thinking about setting up our wall tent and stove up near the Lake and use it for the next section of training. It will be about 27 miles from our house, stop over there for a few hours and then return home. All hopefully without encountering any grizzlies!

Since we have worked on the trail I have learned abit about grizzly behavior, mostly that they, much more so than our other neighbors the black bears, really don’t want anything to do with us. That is fine with me. Also, that if the grizzlies are around, the black bears usually aren’t. And since the black bear has the reputation for often being unpredictable, I think I would rather have the grizzlies. On that note, we did some more trail work on Wednesday and there were no new grizzly tracks. Maybe they noticed our presence from the weekend and decided to stay off the trail.

Kate