August 16

Happy sixtieth birthday, Mom! There is nowhere to go to church but we remember it is Sunday and pray for all of you in our absence daily. Today we drove back through Spencer and Hyder up the Salmon River Road to the Salmon Glacier and beyond. The road was gravel and fairly rough and we drove about thirty miles in but it was worth every pothole and washboard. Scenery continues to be nothing short of spectacular. The road seems to climb endlessly to the primary viewing area but we made numerous stops along the way not only for the glacier but for so many other sights with streams, pools and lakes, water falls, beautiful mountains, vegetation and wildflowers. The view of the glacier was fairly up close and personal but the best part was that it could be seen flowing for miles from high in the mountains down and around into the valley. The only disappointment was that the cloud cover was so low at the summit that we didn’t have as clear a view as we would have liked but I understand that is not unusual. We continued for about three miles beyond the summit and took a couple of narrow, “dune buggy” side roads that went lower into the valley. On the second one we were stopped by a rough creek crossing and Gene and I left the girls in the car and continued on foot for a mile or so of rocky switch-backs into the valley. We got much closer to the glacier but began to worry about being gone too long to keep the domestic peace so we gave up and headed back before reaching glacial ice. Somewhere along the way I need to throw in that Mom has been collecting rocks to bring home the whole trip. At the current rate we will be packing an extra ton so I have been telling her to curtail the collection so today she got caught sneaking another prize for her collection. On the return trip we stopped once again to view the same two bears from yesterday feeding on salmon and watched salmon spawning. We then stopped in Hyder at a small store and Mom got a couple of small raw gold nuggets to be made into earrings for her birthday before heading for the barn. On the way down this morning we saw one black bear and what we later identified through postcard pictures as a timber wolf. On the mountain road we also saw some large, furry rodent-like animal that again we could not identify. On the return trip along the highway we saw another three bears so for the day we saw a total of six bears, two grizzly and four black bears.