Knee News and 4 Years of Critters

Well, the knee news is bad. Full ACL tear. We have a lot to figure out, suddenly.

Retrospective

To give myself something to blog about that is not Knee News (and I do really want to keep blogging), I’m putting together a retrospective series for this blog. My first post was January 1, 2020, so in a few days GDTR will be four years old. Seems like a perfect time to enjoy the memories. I’ll start us off with wild animals, and I’ll try to provide more photos than narrative. (Yeah, unlikely).

Surprise Encounters

We’ve seen animals from coast to coast, tip to top, in water, air, and on land. The surprises always stand out.

A baby octopus showed me its full self before hiding again in a tide pool off the coast of California. I about peed myself.

We’ve seen moose in Minnesota, British Columbia, Yukon, Alaska, you name it. But my first moose established a pattern for all the days after. After watching a cow and her calf while we were boondocking on a mountainside near Red Lodge, Montana, I knew that all days thereafter would be either a Moose Day or a No Moose Day. (My pic from that day is terrible, so here’s one from off the Denali Highway.)

You can make a special trip to see manatees, but these swam up the creek behind our campsite at Christmas in Bonita Springs, Florida, and it felt like a holy visitation.

Herd Behavior

You know when a bunch of animals all act as one, either in a herd or in flocks or in schools: I post about this a lot. Many animals all together, moving as one, sublimating their individual needs. I am hooked.

American white pelicans soaring above me while I kayaked the Mississippi in Arkansas was a revelation. (Alas, they didn’t make it into my photos that day. One can’t be taking pictures during epiphanies.)

And one of the largest colonies of bats in North America live in northern Texas—much bigger than the colony that lives under a bridge in Austin, so don’t settle for that one.

More Surprises

Yep with the giant elk in Yellowstone, but have you ever been trapped in your trailer by mother elk protecting their young? Exciting, as long as your dog is also in the trailer.

Kayaking on top of a school of manta rays in the Keys was so glorious I wrestled the current under an overpass each day after to find them again.

This might not look like a big deal, but these Dall sheep walking along a path on a cliff in Alaska felt like a special sight. We were hiking in high winds, and just by chance we saw them above us. Scroll through to see them without the telephoto lens.

Oh my, this post is longer than I expected.

We’ve seen huge, impressive bears, but the bear I’ll always remember is the one we thought was a fox sneaking into our campsite. Its pointy-eared shadow lead the way, until suddenly the fox became a bear and we had to scramble to get Banjo inside. She does not like bears.

Our most recent surprising animals are the antelope on the prairies of Alberta, Montana, South Dakota. Depending on the conditions the previous winter, there are more antelope in Wyoming than people. That’s a trend I can get behind.

There are the wolves I did not get a photo of. Skunks that chased us across a campground. Porcupines hiding under the trailer, armadillos and coyotes and roadrunners beep beep. My first sighting a several whales at once. The iguana that almost caused me to wreck my bike. A giant rattlesnake under the trailer in the Everglades. A random, lone bison in the window right outside of Butte, Montana.

But, I’ll try to hurry this up here. The animal that’s been with us throughout these four years is the one up top, Banjo, full of character and woe right now, because, with my crutches, I can’t take her out in the sunshine as often as she’d like, plus I’m sleeping in her spot on the sofa. She’s taking this knee injury worse than either of us. Time to rally, Banjo!

We’ll see what other reminiscing I can do in the next few weeks. How about all the best places we’ve imbibed alcohol across the country? Or the weird Harvest Host locations where we’ve stayed? Thought I might revisit favorite hiking spots, too. Let me know if you’d like to see something in particular.

Edited to add: Being heavy on the photos is a bad idea here, seeing as how I don’t have photos from some of my favorite memories. I always have stories, though!