September 21, 2014
Hiking/Boat Drift #1
The plan for today was an easy hike at Snootli Park which was right down the road from the lodge. This would keep us close for our afternoon boar drift adventure. Snootli Park borders Walker Island Park and its clame to fame is it's gigantic cedar trees. As we pulled into the park, there was a hand made sign attached to a sign. We noticed the word bear written on it and took a closer look. It read "Caution - Grizzly bear with 2 cubs in the area - Be Careful". Fortunately, it was dated a month earlier. Of course, there was no guarantee that a bear wasn't in the park. We headed on in and found a place to park near a river. Right out of the car, we spooked a Great Blue Heron. There was also some ducks in the river. Again, lots of wildlife. We found the trailhead and wondered around in the big cedars for a while before making our way back out. The cedars were pretty cool. Many of them had giant holes at there base that a person could easily fit in. Others had section removed, possibly hundreds of years earlier, for canoes and other uses. We headed back to the lodge and got some lunch. It was now time to go see grizzles!! Fraser and Holly are business partners who manage the lodge and drift tours. 
They would both be our tour guides today. Holly took the group up to the river head in a van where we met Fraser. We were immediately told that the tour has begun and that bears are often seen in the parking lot. Minutes after we got out of the van, another guide told Fraser that a sow and two cubs were just above where we were entering the river. We got in the rafts and within minutes we were seeing grizzly bears. Yeah!!!
The drift took place in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. The providence works with the tour companies and regulates times and procedures for all drift tours. I had watched some of the videos and had some expectations of how this event would go, but it was even better than I dreamt. Sue and I had planned this trip to coincide with the "typical" salmon run peak calendar. Of course, nature runs its own schedule and we were told the salmon ran early this year and that we were hitting the tail end of the run. This didn't seem to hinder the bear viewing one bit. We sat and watched the sow and her two cubs just upstream from us, till eventually they evaporated into the brush. The actual drift portion of the tour could now start. So far we had only rowed, we'll Holly rowed us upstream, while we watched the bear. The group was divided into two boats, four plus a guide in each boat. Our boat-mates for the day were Mark and Sandy. They were a Canadian couple who decieded to do some traveling and wanted to see the bears like us. We enjoyed their company and had good conversations with them. As everything else was so far, the river and its sights were spectacular. First we had bears, mostly sows with their first year cubs. Second we had three types of salmon below us, coho, pink and sockeye. Above and on the water were plenty of birds. 
The abundance consisting of (on the water mergansers), while the skies were littered with bald eagles, osprey, heron and of course sea gulls. Life in every direction you looked, many of which was feeding on the death or demise of the salmons breed cycle below. I forgot to mention the air had a very nasty dead fish smell. Very pungent, but the longer we drifted the less noticeable it became. As we drifted down the river, then next bear encounter was a sow with one cub. Mom was fishing. The cub was either trying to steal a bite or watching mom from the bank. We watched them for 20 or 30 minutes before they disappeared from view. On went the drift. We entered a shallower section that bent around a corner to the left. There were lots of birds in this area. We drifted passed the bear viewing stand that the Canada Park System had installed. It was an electrified viewing station that was maned by 3 or 4 rangers. As we were nearing the end of our journey, another sow and two cubs appeared from seemingly nowhere. The sow put on a good show as she fished from the rivers edge. The cubs seemed uninterested and did their own thing while mom was busy. After 5 or 10 minutes they too wandered into the brush never to be seen again. This brought our tour to an end.
Morning HikeAfternoon Boat Drift**
** You may notice that the GPS track does not follow the river on the map. A couple years ago, the valley flooded very badly and the course of the river went through some changes and is not the same today as the map shown.
