There are bears then there is our bear.

We are looking forward to seeing our first grizzly bear but we are also going to be a bit more careful about where we camp and where we walk Charro. Yesterday we went for a walk in fairly dense woodland in Anchorage Botanical gardens where we saw a kind of peonie









which was new to us and an even stranger animal browsing by the flowerbeds.











It was only later we found out that a woman in another part of the forest adjacent to the gardens had been attacked by a grizzly, a sow with two cubs.
sample pic.




She had fought it off and was able to walk to the road and get help. This only the latest in a series of bear attacks in or near Anchorage.

This was an account of another reported attack.

“An Eagle River teenager who fought off a bear during an attack says he got his licks in on the animal, too.
Eighteen-year-old Devon Rees tells the Anchorage Daily News that he's certainly earned bragging rights by boxing a bear.
He says the bear got him a couple of times, but he got the bear a few times, too We had been told that if attacked by a grizzly then we should play dead but according to the survivors of many of these attacks that we should fight back
Experts say the ‘average’ brown bear encounter is 13 times more dangerous than the average polar bear encounter and 22 times more dangerous than the black bear”
However we are still planning to get up close to some grizzlies when we visit Hyder but we should be safe as we get to stand on a raised boardwalk.







MUSHROOMS
Picking wild mushrooms is a growing multi-million-dollar industry up here with Japan being the main market although more and more Americans are looking outside Macdonalds so there is a local market.

Pickers sell their mushrooms directly to buyers at mobile buying stations or established mushroom depots. A pound of Number 1 grade mushrooms can get the picker up to $100. People up here are reluctant to talk because most do not declare their incomes. A good day of picking mushrooms may earn several hundred dollars.
This what they are after.


The pine mushroom is a large, robust, white or light brown mushroom with white flesh which smells good.



We have seen lots of mushrooms while walking around out here



Carol won’t let me pick any for her though. I suppose if I get it wrong we might finish up with some fly agaric which is poisonous and hallucinogenic. Like the pine mushroom it grows in pine and spruce forests and is quite similar in its’ early growth.
The next bit is what happens after you breakfast on the wrong kind of ‘shrooms’.
BROADBAND NEEDED