July 24 - Quartz Creek

We woke early this morning to the dulcet tones of the battery alarm. Apparently, despite the fact that the instrument panel told us we had a third of the propane left, it lied, so when the propane ran out, the refrigerator automatically switched to the house batteries and completely ran them flat. At 6:30 in the morning, we weren’t going to shatter the peace of this place by turning on our generator, so Ger went out to scout for a place that sells propane, and he returned a short time later, triumphantly bearing coffee.

Later in the morning we got the propane and got everything recharged. Then we took a walk along the boardwalk and looked at birds. (Okay, I looked at birds. Sighting list: Boreal chickadee, Townsend’s Warblers, Yellow-rump warblers, juncos, and a little brown bird – known in birding circles as an LBB - I couldn’t get a good enough look at to identify.) The people across from us had seen bears while they were fishing yesterday, so they told us the right spot, and more importantly, the right time. Bears, it seems, take afternoon naps and come out at 10 at night, so we did the same thing and sure enough, down the river, a few hundred feet from a flock of salmon fishermen, we saw a black bear and two browns. Hallelujah! I was delighted to see a family of mergansers in the river, a mama and nine babies. The water was just racing along and I would have thought that those baby birds couldn’t compete with the current, but they got themselves up on top of the water and ran like crazy, scooting upstream very capably. They made me laugh to see them scamper across the river like water bugs.