Trail Blazing at Eucott Bay

September 16th (Monday)
We spent the morning around the boat again, doing some cleaning. We also revised our own weather forecast. Being anchored in Eucott Bay we are unable to pick up any VHF weather stations because of our distance from the closest transmitters, and because of the high mountains around us. We have semi-consistently been able to make contact with the weather-fax station in Alaska with our SSB, and we have been formulating our own forecasts based on them. 

Depending on reception the quality of the images we get can vary greatly, but we try to get the surface analysis, 24 hour forecast, 48 hour forecast, and 96 hour forecast, which are all isobar charts. From these we have been able to have a pretty good idea of what type of weather we will be getting, although the inlets also get a lot of localised weather that we can not account for.
In the afternoon we headed ashore in our kayaks. 

We had decided on three routes that we would like to build trails for in the area. Eventually we would like to have one that goes up the mountain at the south end of the bay near the entrance to the bay, one up and back into a valley to the west, one north into Nascall Lake, and one north and up onto the ridge of the mountain to the northeast of the bay. 

The mountain to the south has a peak elevation of 1393 metres, and from our boat we had scoped out a possible trail route up to the ridgeline. We had decided to start with this trail, and paddled towards the area from which we thought to start the trail. As we got closer, however, we saw a mom black bear and her cub. They sauntered away up the stream. 

Then to our surprise we spotted a mom with two cubs further along the shore, almost right in the area where we wanted to head into the bush. We watched as they made their way along the shore and then up into the bush. We decided that it was best to leave them to their area and instead paddled towards the north end of the bay. We beached our kayaks on the north eastern shore and started making our way, clearing and marking a trail, heading for the ridge that goes up the mountain to the north east of the bay.
It was a beautiful forest. As we started, there was lots of low bush to trim, and the ground was covered in a lush green moss, and as we climbed in elevation and traveled away from the water we entered into a surprisingly open forest. 

The trees were big and widely spaced, and the forest floor was open. At 1600 we put our tools away and followed our flagging tape back down to our kayaks.

Next time we go up we will definitely take our mushroom book with us, as we saw so many different types of mushrooms. We were very happy that we had found a nice patch of Chanterelles, and picked enough to have with dinner. What a treat! And there are more left in the patch for another day. We also found a gooseberry bush, and I brought a branch home for accurate identification. After positively identifying it as a Coastal Black Gooseberry we enjoyed the tasty berries that were on the branch. Unfortunately I don't think there were that many berries on the bush, but perhaps we will find some more, because they were yummy.
In the evening we sat in our cockpit with a cup of hot chocolate, and watched the bears on shore. We saw the mom and single cub down by the stream. Jason even got to see the cub with a salmon in its mouth through the binoculars. We also saw a single black bear further away on the shore. That was eight bears in one day.