SATURDAY 30TH & SUNDAY 31ST – BEAR HUNTING

This photo is taken across Quesnel Lake towards the mouth of the Mitchell River. Note the gathering rain clouds.

Our bear hunting weekend turned into something of an anticlimax in that, while we had a great adventure, the bears simply didn’t cooperate. Our guides, Ryan on Saturday, and Gary on Sunday had really hard days at the office.

Fortunately, so that they could preserve some credibility, we did see a black bear on Saturday. You have seen the photo. He was about 300 metres away and, whether he got wind that we were there or something else spooked him we don’t know, but he disappeared into the forest never to be seen again.

Apart from the fact that we had to get up for a 5:00am breakfast both mornings, the lodge was fun in that, although we slept in our motorhome, we had fully catered meals with the other guests and got to swap war stories.

The Saturday exercise consisted of driving and walking in various rural areas, mostly in distant parts of privately owned property they had permission to enter. Apart from the one sighting of the bear, it was a long day waiting for something exciting to happen with some other wildlife appearing occasionally.

Sunday was more interesting in that we started by travelling for one and a half hours in Gary’s runabout along Quesnel Lake and then swapping to his jet outboard powered tinnie for a 30 minute run up the Mitchell River until we could go no further because of a log jam completely blocking it. We then settled in to a patient exercise of drifting down the river and/or waiting tied to a tree for a bear to appear – but it never did. We patiently spent seven hours in the little open boat enduring periodic rain showers BUT NOTHING HAPPENED. Poor Gary was trying so hard to find a bear but they wouldn’t cooperate. Fortunately our wet weather gear stood up to the challenge and we remained dry and warm notwithstanding the weather.

We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot about bear behaviour but we won’t be hurrying back.