November 02, 2000

Out With the Old, ...

The day did not begin well for my nine year old daughter. A nocturnal visitor, presumably of the bruin persuasion, had eaten the face out of the pumpkin she had laboriously carved 'all by herself'. She was of course rather distressed by this and even a large griz might have been in peril had she spotted his tawdry hide at that moment. She recovered however, and seemed to accept that jack-o'-lanterns are particularly transitory creatures and he would not have been with us for long in any event. Still I felt rather guilty for not having even taken a picture of this masterpiece and of course stupid for having left the pumpkins out. We are normally quite careful about such things, but did not even think about this and so some bear has additional evidence that humans are prone to leave food about. The only good news is that, not surprisingly, frozen raw pumpkin was not all that appealing to him, for he ate very little.

The nice bright day was a pleasant change from the recent gloom, so I headed up the hill in search of some pictures to document the progress on the new Bear Chair. As it turned out that today was the day they chose to eliminate the old Bear Patrol hut. This would have blocked access to North Ridge from the new chair and has apparently been replaced by an over size top station building for the chair. I knew it was coming down, but hadn't thought about how they would do it until half way up Lizard I saw the flames and it became apparent that fire was the obvious way to go.

There was a bit of a wind, so it made quite a show and there was a large crowd of folks up there to watch and I assume to celebrate the new digs. I wasn't invited of course (sniff), but no one seemed to object to my skulking about and taking a few pictures before slithering off again.

Quite of bit of work has been accomplished on the chair and the base station in particular is starting to look pretty real. Of course it is now November and the snow clock is ticking rather loudly. So far there is just a tiny bit of snow up top, but it could come at any time now. Hmmm, definitely time to take the tramp down.