Day 62: Haines, AK
Sunny, windy and cool.
Sitting in Arvi looking at the eagles on the Chilkat River this morning. Tom is going to try fishing just for the halibut (haha). Just for the heck of it. There are supposed to be sockeye in this very cloudy river and the eagles seem to be catching them. But yesterday we read that eagles have like 8 times better vision than humans have. Now we see why the locals use dip nets and fish wheels. The river is so full of glacial runoff that the fish won’t see bait, nor that they are swimming into a trap.
Ok Haines, you win! I wasn’t too impressed with Haines, and I never expected Haines to be the place I would see a bear! Except for the faraway sighting on Kodiak, we had not seen bears in Alaska. Then Tom picked Chilkoot Lake State Park to spend the night so he could do a little fishing.
On the drive in, we saw a very dark bear across the 150-ft wide Chilkoot river, strolling along on some rocks. The bear, standing on a rock, turned its rump to the river, toward several of us spectators, and unloaded a big dump toward us.
After finding a campsite, Tom and I walked back toward the river. Soon we saw a brown (grizzly) bear on the same, opposite bank as before. The bear was a beautiful dark brown. It appeared to climb the two lowest branches of a large spruce tree, then returned to the ground and went into the river. Then it swam a little until it reached the weir stretched across the river. It walked along the weir and stopped on a flat rock and grabbed and ate three fish off the weir over a half hour or so.
We left the bear and came back to camp.
Before going to the state park, we did laundry and washed Arvi. Then we went to The Hammer Museum.
Arvitrekking 
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