| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 |

        Friday was another beautiful day with perfect weather.  As we drove past Warm Creek, a fox trotted alongside us.  As in the past few days, the Junction Butte wolves were milling around their rendezvous in Slough Creek flats.  I counted seven, five blacks and two gray, including the gray pup, though we later heard there were 10.  The pups played tug of war and chased each other while the bedded adults looked on. 

        We could have stayed longer, but we wanted to see bears again so we escaped the crowd and headed back to Hayden Valley.  Hayden Valley and the Lake area seem wilder, more remote than the northern range.  We found Snow, Raspberry’s older daughter, on the side of a deep slope west of Sylvan Lake, crawling over logs and foraging in the deadfall with her two cubs born last year.  The cubs are a bit darker than snow, but all three are beautiful bears with golden fur.  We followed the bears until they crossed the road to the hill on the other side, then waited at a meadow down the road hoping the three bears would come over the mountain.

        A loud pop broke the quiet; rangers hazing the bears, worried Snow and her cubs were too close.  Then the cubs appeared, ambling down the slope of the hill into the tall grass of the meadow, right where we hoped they would be.  It was great fun watching Snow and her cubs, climbing over logs and through the trees for what seemed like hours.  How fortunate to be able to follow this bear we have watched since she was a yearling with her mother and her sister (or half-sister), Jam; all three grizzly sows, all related, in the same area.  I wonder if Snow will keep her cubs for three years. 

Next ->