Moose, Eagle, Hare, Moose, Eagle, Hare! (Jan. 8-9, 2011)

Jon coached 3 pee wee hockey games this weekend, so we did activities closer to town. On Saturday we went for a long awaited ski. We really haven't had any "descent" snow since November. When it does decide to precipitate, it's above freezing so we end up with rain and when it's below freezing, the skies seem to want to be blue and clear. We haven't been out skiing much due to these weather conditions, but we decided to give the trails a shot anyway. And as the weather would have it, the trails were terrible. This of course led us to doing only one lap. However, we did come across a cow and calf feeding off of some shrubs. This was the first time that we've seen moose on the ski trails. We also spotted at least 10 bald eagles perched in trees just at the end of the trail.

On Sunday morning as we walked out of church there was a cow and calf browsing. When we got back from church around eleven, we heard some crunching outside our dining room sliding glass door. I pushed aside the blinds and saw a young bull moose browsing on some exposed grass about two feet away from our door. He moved along the side of the house until he reached a patch of grass at the corner. Here he knelt down on his front two legs to reach the grass more easily. He even on a couple of occasions started to move forward on his knees as if he were doing an army crawl but with his bottom in the air. It was quite comical. We went for an evening hike at the Wildlife Refuge. Due to the terrible ski conditions we decided to hike on the trail used as "ski trail" only, which turned out to be okay. The trails are no longer groomed due to all the rain. It was nice to hike on a couple different trails, Cheechako and Howling Hill, which took us past to beautiful lakes, Headquarter and Nordic. On our hike we spotted four snowshoe hares at various times moving about during dusk. It's amazing how white their fur is.

The weekend was cold and clear giving us some gorgeous views of the volcano, especially at sunrise.