After Grey Wells yesterday, the scenery started changing from the mountaineous to the hilly and it kept that way after Williams Lake as well. We did start seeing some great autumn colours though and it was a calm day so colours reflected nicely on the roadside lakes.
Then inevitably we came to what the locals call The Hill. This is where you have to descend from 1500 metres to sea level, and just about all of it takes place during a 10 km drive on switchbacking gravel road with a steep canyon on your left, so the margin of error isn’t exactly big. When we stopped after about 1100 metres of those 1500, the brakes were smelling rather ominously… but they held just fine and we made it safely down.
I had heard that there might be on opportunity to see grizzly bears near Bella Coola. After asking for directions, we headed for one of these grizzly spots and after some waiting, sure enough a grizzly bear was making its way up the river, catching salmon! The light was just awful though, direct backlight, so the pictures look like ink blot tests but at least the ink blot is recognisably a bear.
Since we heard that there are a lot of bears around and it’s just a matter of waiting, we stayed there for a couple of hours more but all we saw was a black bear in the distance, and a bald eagle that I had the fortune to capture on pixels. This is the first bald eagle – well, wild anyway – that I have ever seen! It is also the first panning shot I’ve ever really succeeded with, even if the image on the left is a serious crop from the original for composition purposes.