Day 8

Saturday,
March 10, 2001

It's been extremely cold today. Phil said he thinks the temperature is between -45 and -50 below. Early in the day we got on to what seemed to be the fresh track of a very large bear. You could see lines in the snow where the long hair on his lower legs was brushing on it. I was extremely excited! I thought we would get up on him at any moment so I was standing up on the back of the sled, constantly looking for him. However, we kept on the track all day. It was almost a 9-hour tracking job. This type of hunt reminded me of hunting mountain lions in Utah with my friend Darrell Mecham. I'm going to have to tell him to train his dogs to pull a sled because my last hunt with him just about physically burned me out. Also, then our friend Steve Salas won't be one second behind us any more. (That's another whole story in itself--right Steve?) We never did catch up with that bear.

9-hour tracking job

A couple of times every day since we've started hunting, we would boil extra water, and David and Phil would flip the dog sled over and pour water on the runners in order to form more ice on them. They use a small piece of polar bear hide to spread the water onto the runners evenly. Then they take a file and smooth out the rough spots. They told me the old way is still the best way. This makes the sled slide smoother over the snow and ice.

Our other sled, being pulled by the snowmobile, has Teflon-coated runners and doesn't need anything special done to it. This sled carries all of our supplies including our tent, food, fuel and seals for dog food. I can't even begin to imagine what it weighs fully loaded. I don't know if the ice-coated runners would hold up to that kind of weight.

That evening I discovered that from the extreme cold and the rough terrain, that everything completely froze up on us. Everything that was plastic broke. Even the PCV tubes that held my arrows shattered into little pieces. Even though it was tiring, it was very exciting tracking that bear all day and I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I know I'm going to sleep good tonight.