Hoping we don't get eaten by a bear tour....actually just hoping to see one

In less than 10 hours I am heading for Salt Lake City from Kansas City. It's only 1100 miles...in one day....no problem...

I always seem to start our trips off with an iron butt ride. Needless to say my wife is flying to Salt Lake. She wants nothing to do with a 1000 mile plus day!

We will be visiting Jackson, Wy, Yellowstone, Glacier, Spokane, Seattle, Mt. Rainier, Portland, Redwoods, Lake Tahoe, Moab then home. She will be departing from another airport so that I can almost do another iron butt home.

We have traveled many states and locations on motorcycle and other means where bear are known to frequent. WE HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE IN THE WILD!!!! We are hoping this changes on this trip....from a far of course!

Good friends of ours from Guatemala toured this part of the country on his way to and from Alaska a few years ago. I was a bit jealous after seeing his pictures. Hopefully we can see many of the same sites that they saw but we don't have near the amount of time!


Let the fun begin!

Speaking of bears - I saw them in my backyard when I was living in Mt. Tabor in NJ. Mt. Tabor is right next to Parsippany.

There was just a very small/low fence separating us from them. A few hours later this event was on news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCZUhvjBcCE


It is a somewhat scary sight.

Subscribed. Good Luck.

Good luck with the trip ad the bears. I'll be following along.

VERY NICE!! We have coyote, dear, turkey, raccoon, and our neighbor even saw a mountain lion in our backyard one day! Hopefully I will get a video of a bear(s) on this trip!! That would make the wife happy!!

Great!! Thanks!

Well day one is in the books! It went something like this...

rolled over in bed and looked at radar... I cussed a little...got dressed...ate small breakfast...

I was on the road by 5:30 and rode in the rain...stopped after 275 miles...walked briskly to the restroom...grabbed a red bull...put gas in the GS...ate some almonds...repeated that sequence (give or take on the mileage) 2 more times...arrived in Salt Lake City 1051 miles and 15.5 hours later. This is the 5th 1,000 mile day I've done and by far the wettest!

The rest of the story is that my oldest daughter had the first bear sighting of this trip last night. She calls this bear dad.... The short of it is we left the ER at 10:30 last night. She is fine but sure scared her old man! She was doing something she was not suppose to be doing and got hurt. I let her know how I felt about her decision making skills in a direct manner. As in all bear stories Momma bear put the smack down on poppa bear for his actions. In the end my daughter understood and called me Caesar...as in APE leader in the latest Planet of the Apes movie. She was Blue eyes. In the beginning of the movie Blue eyes does a stupid thing and is corrected by Caesar. All that matters in this short side story is that she is sore but fine.

So now you know why I grabbed a red bull at EVERY stop today! The weather did not cooperate much today either. It started out raining and I thought it was going to clear up....ahhh no....I dealt with rain on and off all the way to Salt Lake City. One burst even peppered me with some sleet! The high temps were in the low 60's and it seemed like every time a rain cloud hit it dropped into the upper 40's lower 50's

I am also using a Garmin Zumo with the xm antenna. Right now they are pumping out all their stuff for free. Included is the weather information. All day long it was beeping at me and putting banners on the screen "There is rain in the area" "There may be roads closed" All I could think was thank you captain obvious! It was nice to see the radar though and know it was not severe stuff and how long I was going to be in it each time.

I think I was lucky I made it across I-80 today as well. Many of the rivers were very close to the belly of the bridges. One bridge had crews on it monitoring the high water.

My wife will be here tomorrow at 9:30am. We will head up to Jackson, Wy from here. The forecast....thunderstorms. I guess that's what rain gear and heated clothing is for.


What made me cuss a little

Just before departure

This is just north of St. Joseph Missouri in I-29


I-80 in Nebraska

One of the swollen branches of the Platte River along I-80




Gas Stop in Sidney Nebraska with rain clouds to the west

Western Nebraska



Construction and rain....



Good place for these! At least for today.

I picked my wife up yesterday at the Salt Lake Airport. It was nice and sunny upon her arrival but a short time later it was very soggy! We rode in rain pretty much all the way to Jackson Wyoming. We were both frozen to the bone! I had been telling her all along that it was going to suck setting up the tent in the rain. She was pleasantly surprised when we arrived at our cabin with a king size bed! I figured I would treat her to a good nights rest before tenting it Good thing because it rained most of the night as well. I really wanted to explore Jackson but the weather ruined it for us! Next time I guess.

Today really sucked! Those are her words but mine are not much kinder! We rode in rain and SNOW most of today. The lowest temp on the GS dash was 33 F! We are tenting it tonight and the temps are suppose to drop to 32 so I may wake up to a bear in the sleeping bag next to me! Then again my wife may have the bear next to her!

On the plus side of things we saw our bears today!! A momma and two cubs! The down side of that is my wife is already looking for an airport to fly back home! She said her trip is now complete!





Just a few people watching the bears!

Leaving Jackson

In, have a great trip.

Go here worth the $7...

http://www.grizzlyencounter.org

Didn't take you long to find a bear. Congrats on not being eaten.

congrats. I just finished viewing 'Bears of the last frontier' by Chris morgan.
He rode a BMW up into Alaska. his looked like a 650cc model, but he had a film crew in a van with him.

No it didn't!! At least on this trip. But we've only been looking for 9 years!! Lol

We have ridden the Dalton to the arctic circle on a BMW f650 Dakar. My parents hauled it to Alaska and we flew up. We are ready to ride all the way to Prudoe Bay! Just a mater of time!

Other than not being able to upload pics today was a very good day!! We started out the day by slowly crawling out of our warm sleeping bags. It was 30 F when we woke up! We fixed a bacon and eggs breakfast the headed to see Old Faithful.

We got there 5 min after it had put on a show so we had 85 more minutes to wait. We walked the area around there and checked out the other small glaciers. The sun was out we we soon realized we were over dressed for walking as much as we were!

Old faithful put on a great show for us...as usual. We then headed north. We stopped and checked out several waterfalls and waited for a herd of bison to cross the road. We just missed a thunder snow storm and large hail near the upper falls. Thanks to a fellow rider and his wife for warning us the hold out for a bit!

We added a moose to our animal sightings. We have seen elk, deer, bison,large black rabbit, osprey, geese and many other small furry creatures!

Hopefully mas pics tomorrow. We are off to Glacier....if the roads allow!

Sounds like you're off to another great adventure... Ride safe, I'll be following along with envy.

Thanks!! You need to spread the wings on your new ride and come out here!

I'd love it!
I did Yellowstone in 2010 and have a great photo of a grizzly.
I think the smell of urine must scare them!!

great report so far

Thanks!!

Slow going on the RR with no wifi. I only have one bar for signal on my phone. We have had a great last few days in Glacier. 6 more bear sightings. More on that and pics I hope tomorrow.

We are riding Hwy 2 west to Bomners Ferry then down to Spokane. Then Seattle on Wednesday.

Lots of catching up here! Our stay in Yellowstone was short. Only two and a half days. The firs day was very wet and cold! As we rode from Jackson to our KOA in West Yellowstone we were rained and snowed on almost the whole day! It made for a long day.








Did I mention it was a wet nasty day?!





We were lucky that when we arrived to the KOA it had stopped raining but the site we had reserved, Tent Village, was nothing more than a mud pit! I was under the impression that it was covered but it only had a small part of it covered. They were nice enough to let us change sites and gave us a refund of the difference. We were able to get a nice tree covered area that was much better!


We saw this guy on our way to the KOA



The first night in the tent was very cold though! I had done my research on camping in the cold. We already had some good sleeping bags and we decided to bring our 4 season tent which helped. One of the tricks I learned was to boil water and put it in a water bottle. Then put the water bottle in the sleeping bag. I did this for my wife's sleeping bag. The water and sleeping bag stayed warm all night! Ohhh yeah so did my wife I also bought some sleeping bag liners. A sea to summit extreme and another one that is a fleece. Both worked very well.





Our first day exploring Yellowstone started with Old Faithful. We just missed it when we got there. We just spent the next 90 minutes exploring the area around the "Main show" .










The "Main show"

Old faithful....in the background

We then rode to the northern part of the park. We came across a herd of bison crossing the road, moose in a field, waterfalls and a thunder snow storm just for the hell of it!


At the first waterfall











Sheer beauty!! and a nice waterfall too!

Another traffic jam heading back to the camp. These two stayed in the road for about 5 minutes



We only spent two nights here and then moved on the Glacier. It was a little chilly when we got up and packed back up but not bad. The ride to Glacier was about 6-7 hours. We came across a local GS couple at our gas stop. They were out ghost town hunting. It sounded like fun but we wanted to keep going. The sights along the way were vast at times and confined with trees in other places. We arrived at our camp site just in time! We had stayed dry all day but a storm was moving in. So we unloaded in our cabin and waited the storm out before getting groceries.


Our cabin at the Glacier Campground about a mile from the west entrance.

Nothing fancy but it was nice! It had electricity and a small heater. All for just $40 a night

Came with a cooking hut with a gas grill.



A beer in my hand and my wife cooking! Yeah....she's a keeper!!


The next day we set out to explore Glacier NP. The road to the sun was closed near Avalanche camp. So...we took the long way around to the east entrance. We explored several side roads along the way. We stopped to get gas at the East entrance. My wife had an interesting discussion with a local woman. The gas station was closed but you could still get gas. The woman pulled up to my wife and explained it was closed because some "some fucking assholes ruin it for everybody" She explained that it got broken into so they closed. We stopped at the ranger station to get some info then went back into the Many Glacier area.










I guess the scenery was getting boring....or an oops pic...not sure....haha


Our first bear sighting of the day was near Many glacier. We saw a white truck pulled over with a man and woman looking up the mountain side. Hmmm I wonder what they are looking at....ITS A BEAR!! My wife screamed in my ear via the intercom.


This is as close as I could zoom in on it with my camera

The ride back to this area was very nice as well!


This is on the road to Many Glacier

This is one of our favorite pics so far

We then made our way around to Two Medicine lake. Another beautiful place! Here we met a rep for ESS glasses. Nice guy named Ian. We also saw the couple that had seen the bear earlier. As they drove past us I stopped them and thanked them for spotting the bear for us They were a very nice couple. They gave us some pointers for locating more bears and also gave us a suggestion to visit a bakery in Polebridge. More on that later. Very good suggestion!


Two Medicine lake




We then made our way back the West entrance. We only rode 280 miles this day...

Once we got back to the West side we went up the Road to the sun as far as we could. We stopped to check out some for falls and saw a dear. After turning around where the road was closed we stopped at a few more places. We saw a yellow and grey jeep stopped at one location. This was odd because we had seen the same combo in Yellowstone. When I saw who was driving them I asked the guys if they were in Yellowstone a few days ago. They started laughing and had the same debate if our bike was the one they had seen there too. One of them had a BMW F800gs.

We continued along the main road then decided to take an unpaved road across the river. It dead ended about 2 miles later so we turned around. We ran across the jeeps again then..... our second bear sighting. We came around a corner and a very large black bear was in the road no more than 50 yard ahead of us...it went something like this

ME:OH SHIT..OH SHIT..BLACK BEAR...BLACK BEAR!!!
MY WIFE: OH SHIT...OH SHIT!!!
Me: GET THE CAMERA...GET THE CAMERA!!
MY WIFE: BLACK BEAR...BLACK BEAR....
(Short pause)
MEID YOU GET A PICTURE
(short pause)
My Wife: NO!!

It was just a little exhilarating to say the least! It was there for only a few seconds but enough to scare the shit out of us!



This is the road we saw the Black bear on....I promise....




One of the stops before the bears


We then headed back towards the trail head to the hike we planned on doing the next day. Huckleberry Mountain View. On our way there our third bear sighting of the day occurred. It went something like this...

ME: Getting punched in the ribs very hard and yelled at.
My wife: GO BACK BEARS!!!!
ME: Made a U-turn then drove about 300 yards to see 4 bears.


momma bear

two of the cubs. There was another one in the brush

Since my ribs were hurting now we decided to call it a day and headed back to the cabin. My wife fixed another great dinner as I went to get some beer and some bear pepper spray for our hike the next day! Our neighbors
joined us around the fire and shared their s'mores with us. We also compared notes for the day and heard their adventures. Very relaxing and enjoyable evening.

Great update.