North America Road Trip - A small bit of Alaska...

After driving hundreds and hundreds of miles, we ended up in a small one-horse town in Alaska called Hyder, and to be honest, it looks like the horse left years ago.  This is the sprawling urban metropolis we were welcomed by!

Hyder town - not much there!

That pretty much set the tone for the whole place really - it was sleepy/comatose, with hardly anything there and nothing really open.  After trawling the internet, there are a massive 3 tourist attractions in the whole area and yep, we did them all.  On the plus side (especially for Lisa), the tent was avoided (again!) due to high bear activity, so we managed to get 3 nights accommodation in a real room.

The main reason for the trip was to go to a viewing area to see wildlife.  On this count it was very good.  In between the sessions of sitting around with nothing happening, we managed to see loads of grizzly bears, a few black bears, a couple of wolves and some bald eagles.  It did make for some long days though - 5:30am starts to catch the wolves and often later in the day to see the grizzlies.  It was good, but we could have got a bit bored if we had hung around Hyder for any longer.

Grizz going for a swim

Got one!

On one of the days, we headed up to the massive Salmon Glacier (tourist attaction #2) and it was worth driving the very bumpy road as it was quite spectacular.  At the top we spoke to this interesting guy known as "The Bear Man" who was selling books, DVDs and other stuff, he basically lives a a recluse for 3 to 4 months during the summer up there, sleeping in a tent and going for wilderness walks (don't think he has a wash either as there was no water, no wonder there were so many flies hanging around!).  Sounds a bit weird, but each to their own.

This part of our trip gave us a few firsts - some welcome, some less so.  We got to see wolves and bald eagles up close which was great, plus we spoke to some interesting people along the way.  Some unwelcome firsts - on the drive in we unfortunately spotted a dead black bear lying on the side of the road - obviously this happens more often than you would like to imagine, but not pleasant to see.  Lisa also had an "interesting" time performing an emergency stop on the main highway when a bear ran across the road right in front of us.  Lisa = traumatised, bear absolutely fine and legged it.

All in all we've had a good, if brief, trip into Alaska.  Hopefully we'll go back to see other parts of it in the future, but for now more of Canada and the Rockies are on the cards...