Day 132 – July 20 – Hyder Bears

We talked to some people that said the salmon were not in Fish Creek yet, so no use trying to see bears fishing for salmon.  So we decided to go over to the “big” town of Stewart for some gift shopping.  Turns out we spent 30 minutes looking for a shop to stop and go into.  There are two “grocery” stores – located just across the street from one another.  We went into the first one – it had some t-shirts and high priced groceries.  The other one had a larger selection of the same high priced groceries.

We walked across the street to a gift shop – it wasn’t open.  The only thing that seemed to be open were the many liquor stores – I bet there were 4 to 5 liquor stores in the town.  There are a couple of restaurants and a motel or two – oh, and a limo service that uses a Ford passenger van.

We returned to Hyder – no border check going this way, but we did have to stop at the Canadian checkpoint on the way over.  I guess the Canadians have to make sure no one brings in weapons from Alaska.

Our stop in Hyder was the town dump.  Yes that is correct – one of the big tourist attractions here in Hyder is the dump.  We found it without any problem and there was a black bear eating the trash.  He let us get pretty close before he moved up the hill away from the good stuff.

We turned around and started to leave and saw a bear come from the other direction.  This one had an injured left front paw.  We thought maybe he stepped on some hot coals in the dump because some of the trash was smoking.  A few more pictures and it was back to the camper for a while.

While we had a little down time, I cleaned the front of the camper.  For some reason the bugs cannot see this big white camper coming down the highway.  You remember Chuck from Country Boy Campground?  He said to use Pledge on it to clean the bugs off.  That stuff works great – spray it on and let it set for a minute or two and then wipe the bugs off.  And it leaves a nice polish on the camper as well.

After dinner we drove back to dump.  There was another tourist already there taking pictures of the bear – this was a different one than the two we saw earlier.  

 As we were about to leave, here comes mommy and her two babies.  We took some more pictures.

After the exciting trip to the dump (I take Dorrie to only the finest places) we went to the Fish Creek boardwalk to see if the salmon were there yet.  The ranger said not yet, but he really thought they would return sometime tonight.  We will see.

Dorrie took this from the boardwalk at Fish Creek