July 4th Weekend on the Teklanika

The weekend was a bit wet and buggy, but we had a good time. We had a beautiful drive up Friday night, and Saturday was pretty nice too. We got several small jobs done that we had been procrastinating, like finishing bits of indoor and outdoor trim, cutting brush around the cabin, cleaning the woodstove chimney, stacking more firewood, etc...

On Friday night we discovered a big brown bear track on the gravel bar just upriver from camp. According the track book it was a larger than average adult bear. Pretty cool! Our trail cam ran out of batteries sometime in the last month, so we didn't have any pictures of the bear itself, although Piper brought out some plaster and was able to make a nice cast of the print.

We have a pair of belted kingfishers nesting in our riverbank too. Every time we were out sitting by the fire they would start flying around and making a bunch of racket. I am sure they were happy to see us leave yesterday!

The mosquitoes were really bad this trip...once we cut some brush and had a campfire going it was more bearable, but all the rain this month definitely helped their hatches! Speaking of rain, it was pretty drizzly all day on Sunday and we had several cloudbursts on Monday, but that resulted in a couple beautiful rainbows right across the river.

The kids have been asking for us to enclose the space under the "moose stand" for a while, so we finally got that done this trip too. We used a bunch of old lumber from the wall tent platform. They especially liked making the "forest graffiti" with leftover paint we had lying around.

Tuesday was beautiful....of course, the day we had to leave. We took a little ride upriver before we left and the fireweed is totally taking over in the burn area....beautiful! We saw a couple moose and a great horned owl on the way back downriver. The owl was sitting in a tree right over the river and it just swiveled its head around as it watched us zip by....neat!

Fireweed in burn area