Just a small bear

That's true of most problems in life.

Don't forget the key phrase: run like hell!

My younger cat could care less who or what walks up the sidewalk. If a stranger or *especially* kids are playing in the street, the older cat growls.

Too bad traffic is so slow on my street. Might take care of the noisy kid problem

Well, if they're capable of killing us, they might as well go ahead and eat us. Nothing worse than a dead person stinking up the place

I can't stand deer poop

 

Horse and poop: two words that naturally go together. Like cows, horses are poop machines

 

A little on the boots - no big deal. But rolling through a big pile gets on your bike, your legs, your sunglasses, and, well...try not to ride with your mouth open. Ewwww.

 

Sounds like one girlfriend I had. Brrrrrrr I shiver just thinking about her!

So does the aligator

 

I think I went out with her too.

 

Hate to burst your bubble, but that's a bighorn sheep, not a mountain goat. The goats have shaggy white coats with small black horns, live at higher elevations, and generally harder to find.

As a kid we went backpacking in Glacier/Waterton several times, that was a great place to go. Very beautiful, and I agree about the little glacier fed streams and difficulty to take pictures that really capture the scene. Sometime I should go back and compare some of the pictures of the glaciers, see if they've changed much.

I grew up in northern MN, on a small farm, and did a lot of walking in the woods. Would see a black bear once or twice a year. People hunt them there, so if they detect a human, they run off pretty quickly, but you still need to respect them. The closest I got was about 40 feet, and I was looking for a small tree that I could climb if needed (their claws don't grab smaller trees as well) when the bear, sniffing along the ground as he was going, came across my trail. I had stopped, not wanting to move because they have good hearing, and I was kind of hoping he would just go by without seeing me. It caught my scent on the ground, looked up, saw me (they don't have good vision generally, but this guy was close), and immediately took off in the opposite direction.
(Now grizzlies are a completely different story, requiring much more care).

We also had timber wolves there in MN, but it was very rare to see one. We would hear them every couple weeks as the local pack made it's rounds, and every now and then we'd lose a calf or sheep to them. Now that I live in the suburbs of Chicago I've seen more coyotes here than I ever saw wolves back home. And deer are a problem in the suburbs. Historically there were 10-15 per square mile, now the parks have over 100, since we took out the predators and don't allow hunting in urban/suburban areas. All the rare plants (and landscaping flowers, gardens) are being eaten up, causing a real loss in biodiversity. Even Yellowstone habitats were improved when the timber wolves came back in.

 

Deer poop is a lot like rabbit pellets, so it's not real noticeable, particularly in the lawns.

 

As a kid I spent many summers in Kalispell, just outside of Glacier Park, and recently came across some photos of the park in those days. Compared to now, it was truly 'Glacier Park', now it's more like 'Snowy Crevice Park'. As a kid we used a 'back entrance' to the park via Polebridge. In about the mid '70s the bridge washed out. Does anyone know if it has been rebuilt...it hadn't been by the early '80s.

 

If someone would just tell those glaciers that climate change is a myth maybe they'd stop melting.

 

Thanks. I thought it might've been a little slip-up. My sister lives west of Flathead Lake area in Montana, up in a mountain valley, and they see bighorns on the slopes above their house. I think that's so cool. Makes me want to ditch these Chicago suburbs, if I could just think of a way to pay for the next 50 years and not give up my computer, etc.

 

Based on what happened to me, you had better see a doctor. Pronto