Day 194: Bears in a tree

Day two of our Okanagan trip and I had seen that Hardy Falls regional park near Peachland had a kokanee salmon run. Kokanee are landlocked sockeye, and are just as colourful during the spawning season though they tend to be much smaller. This weekend last year we called in at the Adams River sockeye run and I was blown away by the numbers, even though we were close to the end of the run, so I was really looking forward to seeing the "red fish" again. As a bonus, we'd seen photos of a bear in the park but I figured it would be too much to hope that we'd see one.

However, within only a few minutes of parking up and walking to the first bridge to look at the salmon, I heard someone say "bear" and looked up the slope to see a bear dashing away. To our amazement there were two of them and we heard them cross the creek and head into the undergrowth a few metres downstream. We carefully made our way out of the park and downstream to a picnic area where suddenly we saw both bears climbing a ponderosa pine. We stopped and watched for a few minutes, taking as many pictures as possible. I even shot a short video of one of the bears, umm, scratching itself. We left them alone and continued upstream to the waterfall (via a geocache under a bridge) and a third bear encounter! Talk about the classic BC experience - salmon and bears in one place :-) Wow!

Black bears in a tree