Less than a month of life on Windfall Island and Seymour Canal, relaxing by day with full-bellied brown bears, relaxing by night with good books and card games. Two months ago, you could wake up at any hour and navigate through camp on Windfall with plenty of light. Already, in mid August, we're having to use our headlamps by 8:30 or 9. Chillier weather and higher seas are replacing the good ol' days of sunbeams and suntans. It's still comfortably warm in Southeast, but you can tell that the summer season is on its last legs. In less than a month, I'll be traversing central BC once again on my way back to the Mammoth-Gardiner metro area. Just in time to catch the elk rut in full swing and the cottonwood and aspen doing their autumnal thing. While I'll be watching my back for stray bulls with a hormonal buzz and a fight to pick in Mammoth, our good friends Mocha and her cub will be scavenging hillsides for berries and scavenging north-facing alpine for a comfortable place to take a six month nap. Pretty nice to know that pockets of wildness will be continuing their cycles in various corners of the continent.
Making eye contact with a heavy hitter. Although it seems like she's looking directly into our eyes, Mocha was actually looking above and behind us. She passed by casually, within 40 feet or so, and proceeded to permit her cub to smack her in the face a few times, resulting in a brief wrestling match in which there was indeed an obvious winner.
This subadult has one of the goofiest personalities I've seen. Some folks at camp have been calling it Fran (short for Frantic) because it is always wrestling with fish, sprinting up and down the stream with a wide-eyed expression, and getting chased off by various larger bears.
Chili and her two yearlings pausing to catch their breath after consuming more than a dozen fish. The afternoon watching these three bears, combined with an unanticipated piece of news from Juneau, was arguably the most intense moment of bittersweetness I can remember experiencing. 
A Bonaparte gull doing its best not to impersonate a spawning pink salmon within the hungry reach of this bear.
These two subadults, which we assumed were siblings, arrived on scene one morning thrashing and wrestling and playing. They continued their games for two days, wrestling and chasing and taking strolls next to the creek together. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, they disappeared back into the woods, and we haven't seen them since.
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