Photo Journal and Highlights from the Past Weeks

I was looking for a place to stop and take a break when I saw a couple of bright orange rubber cones, like the kind you see in a parking lot, or in road construction.  I hate seeing litter lying around, and I needed a break, so I landed nearby.  There was a small group of caribou that ran off as I touched down and came to a stop.  I jumped out of the cub and started walking towards the garbage to pick it up.  The caribou had run quite a distance by this time, but stopped a thousand yards away to watch me.  Caribou are not known for their intelligence or survival instinct, but they are intriguing because they are so utterly unpredictable.  I would say that their stupidity is outweighed only by their curiosity, so I decided to play with them a bit.  I stuck the brightest orange cone on my head and then stuck the other two on my arms and started walking towards them.  They tried to ignore me, but then decided I was too interesting to ignore, so they came over to check me out, and see if I was dangerous or not.  They walked almost all the way back to the Cub before deciding I really was a psycho and sprinting out of sight.

This photo was taken Northwest of Dillingham and just East of the lake district.  This area is gorgeous, the only problem is that the bugs will eat you alive by mid June.

I found a brown bear chewing on a fresh caribou calf enjoying every bite.  The mom was standing 200 feet away wondering what just happened to her baby.  I watched the bear spotted another cow and calf looking mighty tasty.  I watched the bear pickup the first limp calf carcass in it’s mouth and run down the second calf for dessert.  A 4 day old calf can out-run any human on the planet, and I actually thought the little booger might have a chance because it took the bear nearly a half mile to catch up.  But the little calf tripped at just the wrong moment and that was that …  In the above photo you can actually see the bear, the calf (white speck), and the cow midway through the chase.  If you zoom in you can see the first calf still dangling from the bears mouth.

This photo shows the bear just seconds after chomping down on the second calf.  Sometimes these bears will go into a frenzy after catching their prey, whipping it around like a rag doll and tearing it to bits.  This bear was aggressive but as soon as she had immobilized the second calf she back tracked 200 yards to pick-up scraps that had fallen from her mouth during the chase.  I felt bad watching these little things get eaten but I was sure glad it was them down there and not me.  It’s time’s like these I think to myself, “Don’t quit on me now little engine”.

Even though avgas was more than $7 bucks a gallon we took an afternoon and went beach combing, because it would be foolish not to.  To the untrained eye my buddy is holding a simple rock.  It’s no rock … it’s a fossilized mastodon tooth.  Believe it or not this is the second time in my life I have been standing along side the guy that spots the tooth just milliseconds before me.  It’s been 13 years since I’ve been to this beach but the last time we found a molar that was nearly twice this big.  These ancient creatures have left many amazing fossils behind.

This is the bleached remains of a humpback whale that washed up a couple years ago.  I brought home a single whale vertebrae, and I was tempted to tie one of those ribs onto my wing struts for a…. well shoot, I don’t know what for, but a whale rib is pretty cool if you ask me.

Ol’ 77 and her new friend sittin’ on the beach in a heat wave.

We spent much time combing these bluffs looking for recently exposed fossils.  We actually had some really cool finds.  I showed the mastodon tooth, but we also found a piece of fossilized walrus tusk, glass buoy balls, A HUGE bone to something, two walrus heads with teeth still in-place and …

this half walrus head-set.  I cannot take credit for finding this stuff because the guys with me actually did much better than I.  But beach combing is one of my favorite pass-times and in an area this isolated and extensive you are almost guaranteed to find some amazing stuff.

We flew all but one day of the 2.5 weeks but some of the weather was less than desirable.  The wind was blowing about 30 mph in this photo and it was sleeting.  I had just drained off 6 gallons of gas from my gascolator  into that red can for the helicopter and I was looking forward to crawling back inside my warm cock-pit to eat some beef jerky and coffee beans… my staple.  The weather was forecast to get much worse so when the project came to an end I was happy to have sunny skies for the flight home.