As you can imagine there’s not much a doing on top of the world. The weather’s a little Arctic to say the least. The only people up there are oil rig workers that spend their time counting the minutes until they can return south. I took a ride about, hit a nice green duck and headed south. It’s a hell of a journey for sure but the scenery along route is well worth it.

I stopped at a camp ground in the middle of nowhere about 400km south and pitched my tent. I was the only one there or so I thought. I’ve been wishing to see a bear all along on this journey and I guess my wishes came through. They have big large metal boxes at these camp grounds for keeping your food in. The reason for this is so that the bears don’t rip into your tent to get at it and rip into you in the process. While wandering over to the food bin I saw something moving about 15 meters away. A grizzly, my first one and nothing between me and him. The trees around here are not the biggest and even if you did manage to climb one I don’t think a bear would have much trouble pushing it over. So ignoring the bear safety training course I had taken fifteen minutes earlier from the camp ground notice board I wandered over for a closer look. Now I’m the kind of guy that learns from his mistakes, but unfortunately I have to make them mistakes first so as I can learn. One part of me wanted to get closer to see what he would do but the other part of me wanted to get the hell out of there. The sensible side one out when it started towards me. I backed off shouting nonsensical crap like it says on the tin and hoped it didn’t follow me. After all I was loaded up with the food I was trying to get away from. I thought about throwing it to him but there was a long night ahead and I was hungry. About an hour later a few hunters came and camped along side me, they were armed to the teeth like everyone else up here so I was finally put at ease. I spilled some sort of pine cleaner around my tent, like that’ll work and went about my business. A great night’s sleep in total brightness was had.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.