Lost Alaskan Gold, Now Found

When I got home from Alaska in September and began to go through all of my photos, I realized that I was missing some photos of a grizzly bear showing some nice behavior.  I had spotted this bear traversing a slope below the bus.  Initially, it was maybe 100 yards away.

I resigned myself to the idea that I had somehow erased the wrong photos when my memory cards got near to full.  It left me in a funk that I could be so stupid.

I did have some nice photos of the bear digging up edible tubers. The power of this bear to unearth huge pieces of tundra was something that left a big impression on me. But, I was still missing another behavior that could only be a memory.


Last night, while preparing my cameras for a trip, I did my usual routine of checking batteries, camera settings and memory cards.  When I checked the backup camera's memory card, I saw it had some photos that I did not recognize.  I plugged them into my reader and to my surprise, there were the photos that I thought I had erased. I had forgotten that I also used my backup camera with a wider angle lens when the bear came really close to the bus.  So what was I so fixed upon?

The look on the bear's face speaks of a certain pleasure.  This bear had an itch, and when you have an itch, you look for some way to scratch it. This poor bush was its backscratcher.  It really got into this just like we do.

I recall that the grizzly left the bush pretty well busted up.

Now, in the future, I will practice switching the backup over to take video because this would have been quite amusing to watch.

Paul Schmitt