I'm back.
Okay so here's a fucked up adventure for you. We arrive in the main city nearby where we are working and meet a cab driver...that happens to be my bosses mother in law. Yeah, that was just the first hitch. About an hour later our bush pilot is too much of a coward to take off in rain and fog. So we call some cabs for a 1.5 hour drive to the literal END of the highway (well there's a highway made of ice in the winter over the nearby lake). Sure enough, the cab driver is foreign. I wasn't ready for the amazing spectacle that greeted me: a black man with a hitler moustache. I'm not even fucking kidding.
Okay, so FINALLY we meet the helicopter and throw down towards camp.
this is the face of a man with whom you should never fuck with. I'm on the helicopter there, not a big deal.
Okay so we finally get to camp. They orient me and show me a picture of the bear fence around the camp, holding SEVEN black bears at bay at once. Yeah, they literally swarm as bad as the mosquitos (with long sleeves, bug net thingy and deet I got bit about 40 times in two days and we weren't in the worst spots). Okay, the rest of that day was spent watching TV.
So first day we basically just roll around in the helicopter, doing daring hover helicopter landings etc, checking out rocks on steep slopes and whatnot. Not a big deal, kind of an average day or whatever.
Second day, however...we walk up the Athabasca river. If hippies ever complain to me about man made pollution in that river again, I'm gonna lose it.
That's right, OIL FUCKING SEEPS OUT OF THE ROCKS HERE. I'm not even kidding, this is the tar sands. Lakes around the area have natural oil slicks, there's a reason this river is a mess. So, hippies, stop crying about tar sands development unless you want to get served up a slice of humble pie by nature herself.
Okay, so along this river it's apparently a game trail of sorts. The rock, in some areas, gets so soft cause of the tar/oil that SOLID ROCK can have modern deer tracks in it (I'll get the pic for that later). On the mud however, we found a menagerie of animals constantly walking the same path we walked. Well, we actually just saw their trackways:
Some kind of large mustelid from what I can tell (probably a wolverine or badger)
Wolf track. Where there's one wolf, however, there's always more.
Bear track. Yeah, TONS of these around.
So most of the tracks were fresh. Infact, it rained the last day and all the tracks were filled with water...except one set of fresh wolf tracks. We were about 50 meters behind this wolf and its pack at one point, apparently. No doubt they knew we were there and we were too daft to see them.
Here's another gem, one of the 'tar sands' beetles:
They have a nasty bite and can sometimes dive bomb. Awesome. Along with the wasp friends all over the place, it's a miracle I'm not dead.
This is the type of stuff I had to climb. Pretty awesome, lots of fun cept when my bag got covered in fine grain sand and it ruined my camera!!
On the way back in, which was today, the helicopter was delayed 4 hours as was the bush plane. The bush plane had a GRAVEL AND DIRT runway and had to take 3 tries to take off. As we flew through the clouds, apparently we missed some other aircraft quite narrowly (by flyboy standards) as we had ZERO visibility.
All in all, not a bad trip. Some videos maybe and some more pics for sure coming once I get my hands on them. Sorry it's such a gong show to read this one, I'm not editting it because I have to go out and bang hot chicks.
Okay, seriously though I do have a date again so I gotta run. Let me know if there's something that doesn't make sense or if I'm a total douche bag for some reason.
