A Very Grizzly Day in Haines

This morning we drove southwest of Haines and saw this boat with a personal gill netting type rigging set out for fishing.

We drove on to the end of this bay and it was surrounded by mountains.

We drove to the other side of the bay to the Haines Packing Company.

We took the self-guided tour of the cannery section which has signage about salmon canning they do here.  However, they were currently processing dungeness crab.  That got our interest, so we went to the gift shop to find out if they were selling it.  They were selling it for $6 per crab, so we quickly decided to bring a couple home for a meal.  Here is the sales clerk with our fresh crab in a bag.

That must have made us hungry for an immediate seafood craving, so we stopped here to get some fish and chips to take home for lunch.

After lunch, we decided to drive out east of town for some bear viewing again.  At the bridge over the river, their was a grizzly with her two cubs.  Here are a few of the photos we got of them.

The sow and her cubs went around the end of the bridge a couple of times when they got separated, but they met up again on the road.  They decided the other end of the bridge looked pretty good, and people viewing the bears decided that end of the bridge wasn’t so good anymore and walked quickly to vehicles.  The cub in the middle of this photo has a fish hook caught in it’s nose.  We have a few better photos of that further on in this blog.

The bears got to the side of the bridge where we had been, and went under the railing to travel on this side of the river.

We followed them along the river to the weir as they fished along the way.  Once at the weir, the sow crossed the road as did one of the cubs, but not until after the sow whizzed in the road.

The cub with the fish hook in it’s nose stayed at the weir for a while and continued fishing.  It was successful, so obviously it helps to have a fish hook stuck in the nose.

We still had some time on our hands, so we drove on up to Chilkoot Lake.  On our arrival there, we got to view the sow and her three cubs for quite a long time.  It was very difficult to get a photo with all four of them that was any good.  Here’s one with the sow and a cub directly below her, another below the rock, and the last one is barely visible to the right about halfway up the bush.

The sow swam around in the deeper section of the river in her attempts to catch some fish.

She was successful in catching a meal for herself.

Here’s a better photo with the four of them.

We stuck around for quite a while as apparently, the bear we saw earlier with the two cubs claims this particular spot as her territory and the sow with the three cubs was encroaching on her area.  We were told that she was getting near and would probably be a little bit angry.  We saw the four bears look in the other direction and there was some growling, but that was about all the excitement we saw.  The bears continued to the end of the parking area and caused us viewers to move quickly up the road again and before long they headed back into the river and back in the other direction.  We headed on back to the RV for the evening for dinner.  After dinner, I cooked the crab and we’ll be dining on them tomorrow.