Tag: Forests

Trail Ridge Road

Adventures into the wild take us to the most extraordinary places. You will find narrative and photo records of our adventures on our blog. We look forward to your input on the blog articles as we are constantly tracking wildlife sightings across North America.

Our first family trip into the wilderness was in 2012.  We visited Rocky Mountain National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, and the Badlands.  In all, the trip was amazing!

The photo gallery here is the first photo gallery ever put together for this website.  It consists of our adventures across trail ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park.  The road, constructed in 1921, passes across the northern portion of the Park’s high country.  The adventure spends almost twenty miles above the tree line reaching altitudes over 12,000 feet.

Prior to the road construction, Trail Ridge had been used by Native Americans to cross the mountains between their home lands in the west and hunting areas on the east side. Arapahoe Indians called the trail located on the ridge as “taienbaa” (“Where the Children Walked”) because it was so steep that children could not be carried, but had to walk. The Ute tribe crossing the mountains at Forest Canyon Pass marked their route with stone cairns. The present park Ute Trail follows partially that ancient route.

On the west side, about 1880, a wagon road was constructed along the Kawuneeche Valley from the town of Grand Lake to the mining camps of Lulu City and Gaskill. The camps were abandoned after a few years when short-lived mining boom ended and later the road was used only occasionally by hunters and tourists.

The pictures here were taken on our adventure, the last week of June, 2012.  We hope you enjoy them, and plan on making your own trip to this amazing natural wonder in the middle of our great country.

Wyoming Bear Encounter

During our visit to Yellowstone we were blessed to see bears on three separate occasions, one of which was much closer than we could have expected.  As you can see, the first picture was from over 100 yards.  After the camera clicked, the bear heard the noise and clearly caught a scent.  He came close to check me out – but changed his mind after all when he was about 100 feet away. The gallery below captures the entire event, from the time the bear first headed my way to the time he calmly walked away, heading downstream to stand up and scratch his back on a tree.

Here’s some information about the bears at Yellowstone to go along with the gallery.

An estimated 600 grizzly bears live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  Black bears are common in the park and were a park symbol due to visitor interaction with the bears starting in 1910. Feeding and close contact with bears has not been permitted since the 1960s to reduce their desire for human foods.[100] Yellowstone is one of the few places in the United States where black bears can be seen coexisting with grizzly bears.[100] Black bear observations occur most often in the park’s northern ranges and in the Bechler area which is in the park’s southwestern corner.[101]

What’s the difference between a grizzly and a black bear?

Grizzlies have a hump on their upper back, a rump lower than their shoulders, a ruff of long fur and long claws. Males weigh between 200 and 700 pounds, while females weigh between 200 and 400 pounds. The bears are surprisingly fast, able to run up to 45 miles per hour, and climb trees, although their weight makes this getting up high somewhat difficult. They live up to 30 years. South of Canada, large populations of grizzlies are only found in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and northwest Montana. A single bear will roam over hundreds of square miles.

Grizzly bears are not afraid of humans and are more aggressive than black bears.

Black bears are smaller than grizzlies, with males weighing between 210 and 315 pounds and females weighing between 135 and 200 pounds. Not all black bears are black. Some are brown or blonde. They eat rodents, insects, elk calves, cutthroat trout, pine nuts, grasses and other vegetation and have short, curved claws, making them expert climbers.

Yellowstone is one of the few areas south of Canada where black bears coexist with grizzlies.

What are the odds of seeing a bear on your Yellowstone visit?

Not too bad. Visitors reported more than 40,000 bear sightings between 1980 and 2011. Most grizzly sightings occur at night, dawn and dusk during the spring and early summer. Grizz are most often seen in the Lamar Valley, Gardiners Hole, Antelope Creek meadows, Dunraven Pass, Hayden Valley, and in the wet meadows along the East Entrance Road from Fishing Bridge to the East Entrance of the park. Hoping to see a black bear? Your odds of seeing these smaller bears improve during the daytime, especially when you’re in the northern part of the park along the road between Elk Creek and Tower Falls, on the stretch from Mammoth Hot Springs north to Indian Creek, or in the Bechler region in Yellowstone’s southwest corner.

Sources:  MyYellowstonePark.Com and the Wikipedia page for Yellowstone National Park.

Minnesota Black Bears

The Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary, operating as the American Bear Association, is located approximately two hours northwest of Duluth, and approximately thirty minutes from Orr less than 50 miles from Minnesota’s northern border with Canada.

The Sanctuary consists of over 500 acres of dense aspen forests, cedar swamps, marshes, beaver ponds, a primary stream, and open meadows, all of which make perfect habitat for all native wildlife.  The grounds are home to a wide range of animals including whitetail deer, bald eagles, beavers, mink, pine martens, fishers, timber wolves, red squirrels, bobcats, blue jays, owls, ducks, songbirds, ravens, and a variety of other species.

Vince Shute was an ambitious young man, owning his own logging company in Northern Minnesota in 1938 at 25 years old.   Vince and his loggers lived in the remote north woods with wildlife as their only neighbors. Black bears, attracted by the smells of food preparation and disposal, became a nuisance. Out of fear, the men solved this problem by shooting the bears, but after three decades, Vince began to question the killing. Having observed the animals he came to the conclusion that “The bears weren’t mean – only hungry.”  In the early 70s, to prevent bears from breaking into the cabins, he put food out in the meadow area to see if that would keep them away.

Bears continued to visit the logging camp as a food source during their foraging season. What began as an act of survival slowly evolved into a labor of love. A special relationship developed between Vince and the bears. By the mid-eighties, Vince had become something of a local celebrity and was often referred to as “The Bear Man.”  In the fall of 1993, at the age of 80, Vince approached three friends who shared his interest in the bears. To help secure the bears’ future, he donated his interest in the land for the formation of The American Bear Association, which was established as a nonprofit organization in January 1995.

In today’s world, we now know that Vince was wrong to start feeding wild bears, but he was ahead of his time in seeking a means of coexistence as an alternative to killing. A growing number of people learned of Vince and the bears.  Even today, when the bears are in the two-acre meadow they accept the presence of people. Outside of this area they revert back to their normally wild and elusive ways, exhibiting their natural fear of humans.

The Sanctuary is open Memorial Day through Labor Day each year, six days a week, for only three hours a day (5pm to 8pm).  During that time, the staff of the Sanctuary host hundreds of visitors to their observation areas where they can get close range views, pictures, and experience with large numbers of black bears in all sizes, shapes, and ages.

The photo opportunities are spectacular as the bears come and go through the meadow.  Below are a few pictures from our last trip.  I hope you enjoy them, and I hope I get another chance to visit Vince’s legacy in the near future.

Wyoming Bison

The Yellowstone Park bison herd in Yellowstone National Park is probably the oldest and largest public bison herd in the United States. Yellowstone is known for its geothermal activity and large mammals, especially elk, wolves, American bison, bears, pronghorns, moose and bighorn sheep.

The Yellowstone Park bison herd was estimated in 2015 to be 4,900 bison. The bison in the Yellowstone Park bison herd are American bison of the Plains bison subspecies. Yellowstone National Park may be the only location in the United States where free-ranging bison were never extirpated, since they continued to exist in the wild and were not re-introduced, as has been done in most other bison herd areas.

Other large free-ranging, publicly controlled herds of bison in the United States include the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Kansas (2100 to 2600 animals), Wind Cave bison herd (approximately 350 animals), the Antelope Island bison herd (approximately 550 to 700 animals), the Henry Mountains bison herd in Utah (400 to 500 animals), and the National Bison Range herd near Flathead Lake, Montana (400 animals).

Enjoy the following pictures taken during our last visit to Yellowstone.