We are finished with the first month of camp. Overnight the dinning hall was transformed from a pirate ship back to a regular dinning hall- I kind of miss the gang plank. Camp went well- we played Crud War again and this week Mission Impossible took place in the rain so it was almost dark at midnight—almost. I spent quite a bit of time hanging out on the beach supervising canoeing this week. One day it was raining pretty hard so I decided to take a nap on a pile of life jackets in the canoe shed which was great. I spent one day dressed as a pirate and wore a Hawaiian shirt another day. I love camp dress code- anything goes and we have some great costumes. Some downsides of the week was getting booed by all the Jr. High campers during a quiz game since I didn’t know the governor of Alaska—if you guessed Sarah Palin you’re wrong too. I also got a fat lip since my co-counselor accidentally punched me in the face when she gave one of our campers a hug—there’s a good reason I don’t like hugs. My other “shining moment” this week was during a relay race where you spin around with your forehead on a baseball bat. I spun and then the world spun as I tried to take my first step and I totally wiped out. I jumped up (dazed and confused) and took off running across the field in a not so straight line and proceeded to wipe out again. I finally finished and have had several requests for a repeat performance-luckily for those wanting an encore performance we play that game every week. I’m really enjoying the fact that at camp I can act younger and even more unprofessional than I really am- and it is strongly encouraged.
I have been in Alaska for 5 weeks and have yet to see a bear. Actually the last live bear I saw was in the Omaha zoo. I thought it was pretty funny that Jules wrote about the possibility of more bear sightings due to flooding. Maybe I didn’t have to leave home after all to see a bear. Anyway, a few others decided this weekend that if the bears won’t come to use that we would go find them so I joined in a hunt to shoot a grizzly bear (with cameras- although in hindsight a gun might not have been a bad idea). The group consisted of 2 Kansans and 2 from Ohio so we have a ton of wilderness experience. At least one has worked at camp several years and the rest of us have pretty good bear knowledge from watching nature specials on public television. We hiked out to Wilderness camp and crossed the creek. Since we wanted adventure we decided to break our own trail instead of taken the beaten path. We started off crossing what appeared to be an open meadow to get to the tree line on the other side. The grass was at least 5 feet tall so our heads just bobbed over the top. This prevented us from seeing the marsh and pond until the leader of our group stepped into it. All Alaskans were boots called XtraTufs that come up to your knees all the time—fishing, hiking, playing tag, going to church, etc. We all had these on which is always a good idea when wading through a marsh a foot deep. Most of the time the ground looked solid until you stand on it and it’s just a clump of moss on top of the water. It was like walking on a waterbed and you would start to sink if you didn’t move fast enough. There is nothing more exciting than tromping around marshes. We came to a point where there was a beaver pond we couldn’t cross so we had to retrace our steps back to the main trail. We took the trail for a while and then decided to cut back towards the creek and camp. Once we started bushwhacking through several clumps of blueberry bushes we started to keep our eyes on the look out. We got down to the creek bed and in the sand we saw some rather large grizzly tracks from earlier that morning. We were running out of time before we had to return to camp so even though we were hot on the trail—kind of, we had to find a place to cross the creek back to camp. We didn’t find an option that would keep us from getting really wet so we stood on a sand bar for awhile. At that point we were surrounded by the creek we couldn’t cross and a dense thicket of trees that was probably home to whatever bear left the tracks we found so we didn’t really want to hike through there—we weren’t that desperate yet. We were just about to resign to hiking the long way out when the silence of the wilderness was broken by the sound of a boat motor coming downstream from Wilderness camp. Perfect timing. We stood on the bank and hitchhiked a ride back to camp on the river skiff. We had to admit defeat since we didn’t find a bear but we also realize if we had come across one where we were at it could have been either really cool or turned out really bad so we were okay to miss out on too much excitement. While I was somewhat doubtful we would see a bear I’m all about enjoying the journey and this journey was a unique experience. There’s not many times I’ve been up to my knees in water with grass almost over my head surrounded by majestic mountains looking for grizzly—I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore. 
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