June 5 Big Falls, Voyageurs, Bears

Thursday, June 5

 61 degrees at 8:25 AM.  Slept in, made coffee and used the park’s wi-fi for a bit.  The bike trails we had intended to ride in the park are closed for construction – supposed to be ready June 1 but delayed due to weather.   Ham and egg breakfast tacos with oranges.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff of today:  those oranges.  Yum.

Begins to rain again as we pull out about 9:30 and head north and east.  Stop in Bemidji to restock Mostly forests with a mix of evergreens, birch and other hardwoods. Occasional small farms and local logging. Occasional lakes and streams.  Rain continues and it is 59 degrees at noon.  We have been listening to a book – Richochet, by Sandra Brown – which is entertaining.  Fewer towns like little Mitzpah, population 56.

We come around a bend and  are taken aback by the Big Fork River in the tiny town of Big Falls….words like rampaging, thundering, wild and powerful come to mind.

Brownish black bear ready to flee from approaching larger bear.  The larger one ignored him and he didn't climb any higher. 

We stop to gauk a bit and take a few pictures as the tannin-tinted water smashes, dashes, swirls and crashes its way past us and then head for International Falls and Voyageurs National Park.

We go through Koochiching State Forest and reach International Falls as the rain continues to fall.  I always thought this sounded like a cool place, but really it was just another small town that happens to be almost on the border with Canada.  Smokey the Bear graces their city park, along with a museum to football player Bronco Nagurski.

 There is a huge Boise Cascade paper mill here.  Near the town of Ranier, a little further on, there is a statue of one of the Voyageurs – French fur traders who plied these waters all the way to the east coast.

Voyageurs  Visitor center has some neat displays of ice creepers, a 1964 artic cat, sleds, etc.  We have passed many snowmobile signs, as only some roads are designated for snowmobiles, and many trail crossing signs where snowmobile trails traverse the country.

 There are over 3,000 miles of snowmobile trails in the state.  The fur trade and logging have been the lure of this land and water and there are many displays about this history.   Voyageurs is largely a park of waterways – there are probably 20 or so boat trailers in the parking area to attest to this.  It takes in 218,000 acres with 56 miles of shoreline.  The park is 39% water. They don’t start boat tours till mid-June so we are kind of land bound.

We drive further south in the park to the Ash River Visitors Center.  Still raining lightly.  We watch a film on the park (couldn’t at the first stop because they were having a CPR refresher course in the room).  Lots of information about beavers, since  their pelts were one of the main reasons the voyageurs came.

Beaver Pond

Next we head southwest to the town of Orr.  We planned to boondock at their visitor’s center, but first decide to find Vince Shute’s Wildlife Sanctuary which is only open from 5PM-8PM.  A few miles out of town we wind down a dirt road and finally arrive at a rough parking area.  From here we are shuttled in an old school bus to a raised viewing platform.

Vince Shute was a local logger who had cabins and crew working in this area and had a recurring problem with bears breaking into and destroying cabins.  He hit upon the idea of feeding them to keep this from happening and it worked.  Soon many bears from the area paid irregular visits.  Before he died, he  worried about what would happen to the bears and set up a foundation to continue his work.   The bears  are free to come and go as they please and today they are only fed supplementally and are not interfered with otherwise.  They try to instill that this is a safe place to find food, not a place to get food from humans, though I’m not sure how successful this is since a young man walked among the bears putting out food from time to time with no apparent concern or interaction.

From the raised platform we saw probably between 20 and 30 bears, including a mother with three cubs.  She sent them up a nearby tree while she ate and when a big male approached she herself went up the tree too.  There were quite a few bears in trees.  These are all black bears, though some are cinnamon color. It was very interesting to watch and there were probably about 20 people there, along with a handful of employees who talked about the bears. There is an obvious hierarchy among the bears and the less dominant always make way for the dominant. See www.Americanbear.org.

Cub looking for Mom

We saw a beaver busily working on the schoolbus ride back to the van.  The road was actually a bit under water and the driver said they were going to have to do something with the beaver because his dam was causing flooding of their road.

We went back to the visitors center but soon had lots of mosquitos in the van, so we moved to a little city park.  We got out the bug zapper that we had used in Alaska and went to work clearing the van of the nasty little critters.  Posted a query on the roadtrek website asking for suggestions on how they could be getting in.  Re-sealed around the windows and taped plastic over the stove vent and the AC vent in response to some suggestions.  We’ll see how that works.