The park is divided up in to different zones and numbers to each are strictly limited. As you can't book a zone in advance, it is something of a lottery as to which areas are available to hike in. I thought that I would hate this kind of restricted system, - however the necessity of it quickly becomes obvious. The park is a true wilderness with no trails or facilities at all and without some sort of restrictions the place would be overwhelmed.
On the advice of the ranger we ended up with zone 8, which sits behind a critical wildlife zone, so there is no access directly from the road (this is OK though, you can start in a different zone as long as you camp in your zone.)
After dropping down the road to the river we were immediately in bear country. The scrub was thick enough to hide bears and the wind was against us. Good enough reason to start shouting.
Up on the ridge we relaxed a little, but then as we started sidleing around the side of point 4739 we spotted brown moving shapes in the distance. Grizzlies! A mum with two cubs.
We altered course to avoid them, and ended up contouring much higher than we had first thought. A trip in to the side valley was cancelled, when another bear spotted us before we saw it and headed off in that direction.
Instead we headed down to the Tolkat River Valley to camp, a nice location with much less bear sign and good views in each direction. We adopted proper camping procedures for bear country, cooking 100m away from the tent and storing the food also 100m away to make a nice triangle.
The next day was wet, so we walked out to the road mid morning. This gave us time to catch the bus further in to the park, where we spotted more bears and even some wolves.
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