It's Not Getting "Bogged Down" If You Are Up Afterwards

After the excitement of the quality bear, we did the famed Rusebukta Landing after lunch.  Kasper Jaeger was our hike leader, and he lead us on an amazing journey through bogs and snowbanks and rivers and around lakes, and up and down a bit.

Kasper is quite a good naturalist, although he is quite the taskmaster.  No time for photos.  He speaks six languages, and is funnier in his fourth language of English than a lot of naturalists for whom English is their first language!  We ended up having dinner with him one night, and he has some great stories of his life – pretty good for a 32 year old!

Our first stop was at the skull of what he reasonably believes is a bow whale, which has the biggest mouth of any animal in the world.  Then, we walked along some stone areas that had some water, some purple saxifrage, and huge silvery-looking wood that had washed ashore from Siberia.  The wood was really tripping the light fantastic.  Then we walked through a stream.  With the mountains in the distance, the views were sublime.

Then we cut over through some bogs where you really had to work to get through it.  Yes, the bog was grabbing at our muck boots, and it seems like everyone had one footfall where their foot was lifting up but their boot was not.  No one in our group came out of their boot, so that went well.  

At one point, cutting through some streams and bogs, we came across a larger group of reindeer that were quite curious about us.  They would come close, then move away, then come close, then move away.  They received enough reinforcements that they could have led Santa’s sleigh with folks to spare.  

Then we tromped through a shallow, but fast moving stream.  Another stream was deemed too deep by Kasper, so we doubled back around the lake.  Even though there was very little elevation gain, the hike was tiring simply because of the need to fight through the bogs.  But, the fun of working through the bogs made the hike exhilarating.